I didn’t start as a big reader growing up. I read an average amount of books and content, mainly the things I was required to read in school. I was interested in certain works and read them for fun, but I really didn’t develop that appetite until my senior year of high school, and then voraciously in college.

Over time, my love for reading grew bigger than my ability to consume it.

I remember walking into libraries excited to find something new, but also feeling a bit melancholy knowing I won’t live long enough to read everything of value. I still think about walking into a library in West Palm Beach in high school and feeling the shelves close in on me with the weight of everything I’d never get to read because of the laws of time.

Years later, standing inside El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires1, a converted theater where the balconies are still intact and the stage is a café, I felt it again. All that beauty. All that impossibility.

Over time, I learned to read by interest rather than relying on top reading lists. This made reading much more approachable. If I had an interest in early American history, for example, I could read the canon of foundational works and feel competent enough to discuss or even teach it — and then dig further down the rabbit holes if my interest continued to grow.

The appetite that keeps expanding

That appetite, however, kept expanding. I found myself wanting to read everything that came my way — the news cycle from multiple sources, top magazine articles, several books from every bestseller list I encountered. Eventually, I realized that much of this content was irrelevant after a year or two. Even some of the books.

These experiences don’t end with books and articles. Social media has the shortest lifespan of all. Something you saw today could easily be out of trend or inconsequential tomorrow (if it had any value to begin with).

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A related example: my neighborhood Facebook group. I used to get notified every time someone posted something. But I found that constant stream of information created anxiety. Someone got fined by the HOA, someone had an argument — and suddenly I’m turning it over in my mind for days. Meanwhile, someone not in the group is living their best life, completely unbothered. If something actually affects them, they’ll get a letter. That, I’ve come to believe, is the better situation. Now I check the group once a week, manually, on my own terms.

Our brains can only hold so much, and what we choose to let influence us does affect us. This is why we should be far more mindful about the information we consume. Schopenhauer wrote:

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. — A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”

When I first read that, I wasn’t sure whether to feel validated or indicted. Probably both. But I’d push it slightly further: the goal isn’t to read less. It’s to read with enough intention that what you finish deposits value in you.

The case for information minimalism

Limiting information is not natural. There was a time when information was scarce. Now, in a single day, we consume more than someone in the Middle Ages consumed in a lifetime.

Yet we are among the first generations that need to intentionally decide what to consume and what to ignore. For the first time in history, having a large library — infinite information on a device — is no longer an advantage in itself. It can be a liability.

This is where curation fits in. We have the opportunity to identify sources of information and learning, and to curate what we actually want to explore. Each thing we read should provide value, whether that’s learning something new, gaining empathy, or simply enjoying a moment of relaxation and renewal. These are good things — and I’ve had to learn to treat them that way deliberately.

What a personal library actually is

Over time, the works you enjoy most become something more than books. I had a copy of As a Man Thinketh I’d read and marked up over years — margins full of notes, dog-eared pages, whole passages underlined twice. I gave it to a friend who needed it. I’ve thought about that book since, not because I lost it (I could always get another copy, but that wasn’t the point), but because I realized I’d given away years of my own consciousness along with it. That’s what a personal, breathing library actually is.

It’s not until we learn to say no to certain things that we can truly absorb what we do read. The mind becomes clearer and more focused, with more energy to process what it has actually consumed. We are no longer scattered by so much information that it feels like matrix code. Things begin to make sense.

Reading less, reading deeper

When we are more selective, we can also read less in general — not dramatically less, but perhaps a few fewer books a year if those books weren’t adding real value. That freed time can be spent going deeper on the ones that do.

I find, as well, that it helps to take breaks from reading altogether. I like to read multiple books at once and keep a rolling list so I never run out of material. But in doing this, I sometimes eliminate time for reflection, and what I consume doesn’t fully set in. Planning a deliberate pause can help you settle what you’ve learned — finding ways to practice a skill in real life, or testing ideas from a novel in your actual interactions with people.

A few years ago, having kids, I decided to cut my reading goal in half. Because of this, I became much more careful about what I picked. I stopped wasting time on works I wouldn’t enjoy and naturally created rules: not reading new books, for instance, unless I kept hearing about them years after publication.

I also found that when I’m in a season where I need an open mind or to reinvent myself, I increase my reading goals and add more fiction to the list. This helps me think creatively and cultivates a quiet, passive curiosity in everyday life.

The art of enough

In essence, the art of not reading is the pursuit of information minimalism. We can choose what matters to us and, with intention and discipline, eliminate the rest. Anything truly important that we miss will find its way to us.

By learning not to read everything, we become more selective and intentional about what we do read. And that, over time, is how reading becomes something you actually remember.

There is a tension that comes with a blank page. Writers have always known this feeling. Now, for the first time, they are being asked whether it is still worth wrestling with the art of writing on page one.

Today, AI can produce sentences. It can build paragraphs, arguments, even books. What it cannot produce is truth. It can only produce plausibility. And writers, from the beginning, have always been in the business of truth.

The oldest reason to write

Many great writers have written an essay titled Why I Write. George Orwell, perhaps the most famous, broke the act of writing down into four motives: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. The proportions vary in every writer, but the drive underneath is the same: to see things as they truly are and set them down honestly.

Long before Orwell, John recorded a voice in Revelation instructing him to write, for these words are faithful and true. The command was not to write beautifully, or efficiently, or persuasively. It was to write truthfully. Hemingway, years later, put it in craft terms: write the truest sentence you know.

The imperative has not changed, but the pressure against it has.

So this question of why I write turns philosophical. It is no longer Why I Write but Why I Choose to Write. The difference is everything, and to understand it, I keep coming back to tiles.

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The value of imperfection

I am a fan of Spanish and Portuguese tiles. I enjoy seeing vibrant blue designs all over tiles on streets and homes. They are beautiful because someone took the time to craft them. They are inefficient and not technically necessary; a machine can do that. But machine-produced tiles look the same. There aren’t slight variations per tile, and they look dull. The beauty lives in imperfections, originality, and the heart that goes into the art.

This is what Orwell called aesthetic enthusiasm: the pure pleasure in arranging things just right. But “just right,” in the case of modern art and writing, doesn’t mean perfect. It means true to the hand that made it.

These tiles are rare and sought after. I am jealous of those who live in cities where craftsmen make them. It is very difficult for me to find local versions in South Florida. A store might carry them, but craftsmen did not make them by hand. If I want the real thing, I must import them, and the markup makes that impractical. Until then, they remind me that some things hold their value precisely because they cannot be scaled.

The writer’s situation is the same. Great writing reflects our unique perspectives, as original and rare as a fingerprint.

The writer who can express a fresh perspective clearly, and connect with a reader, will outlast AI. Not because machines are inferior, but because the value was never in efficiency or perfection. It lives in the fingerprint: the rugged, raw, organic wonder that introduces itself to the world for the very first time. There is nothing special about efficient writing. There is, however, something special about a true sentence.

The garlic problem

I find that asking AI to produce something, even with unique ideas and outlines, will still saturate the piece with sameness. My grandmother’s kitchen taught me why. In my culture, our most prevalent spice is garlic. My grandmother would start each dish with garlic, sweet peppers, onion, olive oil, and a slice of Spanish chorizo. This sofrito formed the base of every dish and gave it its familiar and profound tastes — and it was the perfect balance.

But let’s say someone loved garlic so much that they added an entire head to every dish, no matter what they were cooking. It would not matter if they were cooking meat, chicken, or squid; everything would taste like garlic, to the point that these dishes, even with pungent tastes, may taste entirely the same.

AI is the overextended garlic: it saturates everything it touches with the same flavor, the same rhythm, the same angles, until the dish no longer tastes like anything in particular.

An outline and big-picture idea can go through AI, but it will fill in the gaps with overused ideas, examples, and angles. Even during revision, if you correct something or change it, AI might revert to its original clunky phrasing and staccato sentences; in essence, you’re fighting with the tool to keep your voice. Prompts help, but the dance, the tango, never goes away.

Writing as discovery

But truth is not only found on the page. It is also found in the act of reaching for it. Joan Didion understood this perhaps better than anyone. In her own essay Why I Write, she said she wrote entirely to find out what she was thinking, what she was looking at, what she saw and what it meant.

Writing, for Didion, was discovery, not output. In my own life, I often find that if I feel overwhelmed, it is because I have not written. When I write my thoughts, concerns, and ideas on paper, I express myself and feel much better. Writing externalizes energy that builds up within the mind. If you cannot immediately act on your thoughts, you store only passive energy, and there is only so much you can hold before you feel overwhelmed.

When you interact with AI, you lose this exercise. The writer instead holds conversations with AI and falls into thought loops that feed paranoias and realities that may not even exist. I noticed this in my own life: the more I leaned on AI during the creative process, the harder it became to hold attention, to sit with a problem, and to think a thought all the way through. So I made a change. I now limit AI deliberately, and I only bring it in after the creative work is done. The research supports this instinct. Studies already show cognitive decline in basic tasks when people use AI too much, and mental health concerns are rising among heavy users.

Writing is communication, and we need the ability to communicate with ourselves and with others. If we replace that communication with total reliance on AI, we don’t just lose a skill. We lose the instrument through which we find out what is true.

The struggle is the source

Originality and communication matter. But art cannot be delegated. The writer can use AI to aid in this art, but they must still be the captain. Otherwise, by letting AI lead, they become passive participants in their own work. The benefits of art, which are expression, beauty, and appreciation, no longer belong to the human when they do not sit in the pilot’s chair.

Great art is often different, shocking, or the result of a real struggle. In his essay Why I Write, Orwell described writing a book as “a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness,” driven by a demon one can neither resist nor understand. That demon belongs to the writer alone. No one can summon it on their behalf, and no tool can wrestle with it in their place. I’ve heard it said that if you feel frustrated about something, or you have something you can’t keep to yourself, then you’re ready to write your novel. This is very true, and it is why art is intimate. The demon is not a problem to be solved. It is the source.

As time passes, we will see more AI art where the human does very little. Many people will enjoy it. But it will not deposit into a greater conversation, not until an artist has something true to say. Plausibility fades. Truth accumulates.

Only you can write it

This is why we still write. If it were about output, writers would have always hired a team. They never did. Because writing is not a service you outsource to yourself, let alone to a machine. It is the thing itself.

We should write because we breathe; because we love; because we continue to desire connection and expression in this world. And because somewhere between Orwell’s demon, Didion’s discovery, and John’s faithful and true, there is a sentence only you can write.

Before GPS and radio triangulation, before any of the navigation technology we now take for granted, sailors in fog relied on a single thing to reach the shore: a light.

The lighthouse keeper’s job was not to be brilliant. It was not to broadcast. It was to tend the light and keep it burning consistently; to make it reliable enough that a ship miles out in the dark could find its bearing. The keeper, however, wasn’t the destination, but the orientation. There’s a difference.

I think about that distinction a lot when I look at what we call “content” today.

There’s more of it than ever. More posts, more newsletters, more podcasts, and more takes; a permanent, scrolling fog of borrowed words and ideas. A concept surfaces somewhere, gets picked up and rephrased and redistributed until it’s been repeated so many times no one can remember where it came from. This is noise. And it multiplies until the original signal disappears.

The internet made publishing frictionless, and that’s genuinely good. But it also made borrowing frictionless. When you can build an entire piece of content from three tabs, a summary tool, and a template, you don’t need to think — you need to produce. And producing without thinking is how the fog gets thicker.

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I know this because I contributed to it. In my early days of writing, I was focused on volume; showing up and saying things. I told myself consistency was the point. And in some narrow sense, it was. But I wasn’t diving into anything. I was summarizing things other people had already dived into. I was holding up a mirror to someone else’s light; not my signal, but a reflection.

There’s an old Aristotelian distinction between knowing a thing and knowing the cause of a thing. You can know that aspirin relieves headaches without knowing why. Most of what passes for insight online is that first kind of knowing (the what without the why). Aristotle would have called it experience, not wisdom.

Original thinking begins when you refuse that shortcut. When you go back to the source instead of the summary. When you read the actual study, the actual primary text, the actual history, because you want to understand something well enough to have an opinion about it that belongs to you.

This is harder than it sounds. It’s slower. It often leads nowhere useful for months. But there’s a particular kind of confidence that comes from knowing you’ve actually read the room for yourself. You start to notice gaps in what everyone else is saying. You start to ask questions that haven’t been asked. And the questions, it turns out, are where the original thinking lives.

Curiosity is a practice. You can get better at it, and the first step is treating the obvious sources as the beginning of the research, not the end of it.

The ideas worth keeping are usually the ones you almost didn’t pursue because they feel too niche or strange, too far from what people seem to want. But that strangeness is often the signal. It means you’ve gone somewhere few people have bothered to go.

When I find one of those ideas, I ask myself a few things. Would I spend time with this even if no one read it? Is there something missing in how it’s been explained, some gap in the logic I could actually fill? Does my particular background give me an angle on this that someone else wouldn’t have?

That last question matters more than it sounds. The goal isn’t to write from identity as a credential. It’s that your experience is irreducibly yours, and that specificity — when it’s honest — is what makes writing feel like it was written by a human being and not assembled from parts.

A lighthouse is useful because it’s in a particular place and there’s specificity.

Once you’ve found an idea worth developing, the worst thing you can do is present it fully-formed. Tear it open first and push on its assumptions. Find out what it’s taking for granted. Ask why the idea exists.

This is where the real work is: in the dismantling; sitting with an idea long enough to understand what’s holding it together and whether it actually deserves to hold together.

Then, when you rebuild it, you rebuild it in your own voice, for your own reader, with your own honest assessment of where it’s strong and where it still has questions it can’t answer.

That honesty is what keeps writing from becoming noise. While noise is confident, the signal admits what it doesn’t know and drives curiosity.

I don’t think the goal is to be original for its own sake. The goal is to be useful — to offer someone a way of seeing something they hadn’t considered, a question they hadn’t asked themselves, a bit of orientation in a fog they’re already tired of navigating.

The lighthouse keeper didn’t tend the light to be seen. They tended it so others could find their way.

Maybe that’s the right frame. Not: how do I stand out? But: what do I actually have to offer, and am I willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of finding out what that is?

I’m still working on that question. I suspect I will be for a while.

Maybe we weren’t normal teenagers. At least that’s how I felt when the police officer shined his beams on us in the parking lot.

My sisters and I are close in age, and we had a lot of the same friends. We also liked getting together for board games. Like most of Florida today, we lived in a gated community with a clubhouse. We invited several friends to join us for a game night, but our driveway wouldn’t hold all their cars, so we had them park in the guest lot at the center of the neighborhood. We met there, chatted, and were about to ride back together when the officer pulled up, parked facing us, and watched.

We didn’t think anything of it, as one wouldn’t when they’re innocent and doing something fairly wholesome. But right as we were heading out, he hit us with his beam.

Then he got out of the car, demanding to know if we were throwing some kind of party, already braced for a scene. Our faces went pale. And when we told him we were going to play a board game, we sounded exactly like what we weren’t: liars. He looked as confused as we felt. We laughed about it later, in private, the way you do when something is too strange to explain.

I’ve thought about that night many times since. What made a group of teenagers gathered in a parking lot so unreadable to that officer?

We were doing something increasingly rare: gathering in person, with intention, around a shared activity that required nothing but each other’s presence.

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Each day, we lose more of these analog, in-person experiences to technology, social media, and the frictionless pull of screens. But something is pushing back.

Recently, news spread of younger generations returning to what their grandparents once did: knitting, crocheting, baking from scratch. These aren’t nostalgic gestures so much as deliberate ones, a rejection of the dopamine-saturated pace of modern life in favor of things that are slow, tactile, and real.

Board games belong to this same impulse; and like those other analog rituals, they do something screens have never managed: they reliably bring people together and keep them there.

They are also some of the oldest and most enduring human inventions. In Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story, he explains his excitement about chess: a game he describes as constantly evolving yet sterile, limitless yet bounded. A child can play it, and an international grandmaster can play it; it belongs to everyone and to every era.

Zweig captures this experience precisely:

“Is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art…a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and action form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all people and all eras…Any child can learn its basic rules, any amateur can try his hand at it; and yet…masters unlike any others evolve…”

I think about the game Catan the same way.

I find myself obsessed with it precisely because it holds the same paradox: a novice and an expert can sit down together, and both find themselves genuinely challenged.

The board itself changes every game; the hexagon tiles shift, the ports move, the numbers redistribute. No layout can be memorized. No single strategy dominates. There’s luck, but not enough to absolve you; there’s skill, but not enough to guarantee you. That tension is what makes it, to my mind, a nearly perfect game.

But the game is almost beside the point. What board games offer that almost nothing else does is two uninterrupted hours of conversation and competition: in person, without an exit ramp.

When you go to dinners or outings where people are half-distracted by their phones, the moments that could become memories dissolve before they form. Board games seal that leak. They create what I’d call a third state; not a third place, but a mental and experiential space where distraction isn’t just discouraged, it’s structurally impossible.

You come back from that space with something: an inside joke, a shared grievance, a story. You find yourself referencing that one game of Catan a year later with people you might otherwise have lost touch with.

Part of what makes this possible is the restraint built into the game itself. There are a fixed number of pieces, clear rules, and defined limits: a container. This is almost aggressively countercultural. We live in an age of total access; any information, any video, any distraction, available instantly and endlessly. The effect isn’t expansion but saturation. There’s no time to think, to sit and write with what we’ve taken in. We absorb without processing, and too much of anything unprocessed becomes overflow: like a plant watered past its capacity, it doesn’t grow, it drowns.

Loneliness has become one of the defining crises of our time, and it is in large part a crisis of presence: we are more reachable than ever and less available to each other.

Board games are a surprisingly direct remedy. They require you to show up, stay put, and pay attention to the people across the table. Some find this kind of grounding through fishing on a pier, or a recurring conversation group; the specific activity matters less than the structure it provides. But few activities are as accessible or as repeatable as pulling a game off a shelf and calling a few people.

When I play games like Catan and post a picture, friends reach out. Not about the game, but about wanting to be part of whatever was happening around it: the conversation, the room, the feeling of being somewhere that was actually somewhere.

That’s what cafes understand when they host trivia nights, and what neighborhood Facebook groups are fumbling toward when they post event flyers. People are looking for these moments. There aren’t enough of them.

You don’t have to wait for an institution to provide one. You can pull a game off a shelf, invite people the same day, and find others eager to show up. These gatherings are harder to replicate than we think and more necessary than we admit. Apparently, that’s strange enough to warrant a police investigation.

Every morning, millions of people sit inside a metal box, inching forward, and reveal who they are. Traffic doesn’t only slow you down; it shows how you respond to being slowed down. That response, it turns out, is one of the more honest reflections of your character.

South Florida gave me plenty of opportunity to test this.

I’ve dealt with enough traffic here that I’ve gotten used to it. I grew up with the traffic of West Palm Beach, the passive-aggressive drivers in Boca on my way to FAU, and the Fort Lauderdale and Miami traffic on weekend visits to family.

We now live further north, but we often made long drives to Boca while my wife was pregnant and to Miami for family gatherings. Along the way, we’ve sat through jams caused by accidents and the regular rush-hour flow. Of course, we are not the only ones dealing with this. Traffic is a universal problem.

Because of this shared experience, traffic reveals something interesting about human behavior. In a traffic jam, most people fall into one of three patterns.

Some get angry; hands on the horn, muttering at strangers, arriving wherever they’re going already defeated.

Others escape: they put on a podcast, scroll their phone at red lights, do anything to avoid sitting with the discomfort.

And a few, a smaller few, simply accept it. They go still. They let the traffic be traffic.

These patterns reveal more than how we handle traffic — they reflect how we handle life.

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What traffic reveals about us

We all have off days, but our consistent reactions during traffic reveal something deeper about us.

Our response to traffic shouldn’t be judged by the one instance where we lost control. What matters are the patterns. We might ask ourselves: Am I regularly losing my patience when someone cuts me off? Do I grow frustrated whenever I’m stuck bumper-to-bumper?

What we often discover is that these same reactions appear in other parts of our lives. I’ve noticed it in myself; the same impatience I feel toward a slow driver surfaces when a meeting runs long, or when a conversation doesn’t go the way I expected. The trigger changes. The response doesn’t. Traffic, in this sense, is not an excuse for our feelings — it is a revealing moment.

Traffic is a gift

For that reason, traffic can be a gift.

Where else do we get the opportunity to practice managing our emotions in such a safe environment? A traffic jam becomes a daily exercise for the mind.

When we feel anger, it might lead to reckless driving or exaggerated hand gestures directed at nearby drivers. This anger often represents a refusal to accept reality. Instead of controlling our emotions, we allow the circumstance to control them.

The second option is escapism, which is where I often find myself. I remember sitting in standstill traffic on I-95, listening to Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, Tom Holland’s account of Rome’s collapse — absorbing the fall of an empire while ignoring the frustration of my own commute. In itself, this isn’t necessarily bad. But it becomes a problem when we use it to avoid the situation entirely.

Even without these distractions, our minds may wander. I might start thinking about a future trip, a movie I recently saw, or a meetup I’m supposed to have with a friend later in the week. These moments aren’t harmful on their own, but they become a hindrance if we use them purely to escape reality.

The final option is peace.

Choosing peace means being fully present and accepting the circumstance as it is. You might still have music or other entertainment, but it becomes peripheral. The traffic, the impatient drivers, and the slower passage of time no longer disturb you.

In fact, the delay might even become useful. You might rehearse a presentation out loud, think about how you can help someone in your life, or reflect on ideas for your day. Unlike escapism, you are not ignoring what is in front of you. Instead, you accept it and even use the moment to your advantage.

To master traffic — to master the unfortunate — is to study and appreciate your surroundings and learn from them. It is, ultimately, to be at peace.

Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary offers a striking example of this. Its protagonist, Ryland Grace, wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of his own name, two dead crewmates for company, and a mission that was designed as a suicide run. He has every reason to despair. Instead, he orients himself to his circumstances and begins solving problems one at a time. His survival — and eventually, the survival of humanity — depends not on what he wished were true, but on his willingness to fully inhabit the situation in front of him.

Grace had no choice in his circumstances. Neither, most mornings, do we.

Justifiable reasons for frustration

Of course, some might argue that there are legitimate reasons to feel upset in traffic.

Perhaps you are running late for work or an important appointment. Maybe you value your time and hate the feeling that it’s being wasted. These are fair concerns. But they still don’t require unrestrained emotional reactions.

Traffic is only one part of the larger equation of life. Often, the pressure we feel in traffic is the result of earlier decisions — leaving the house too late, mismanaging our time beforehand, or relying too heavily on our personal sense of control.

We can control some things, but we cannot control our circumstances. Seneca, the Roman Stoic, understood this well. He wrote that we suffer more in imagination than in reality, that the obstacle itself is rarely the problem; our resistance to it is. This tension between preparation and acceptance is one of life’s constant challenges.

Peace in traffic

Once we responsibly do what is within our control — planning ahead and accounting for possibilities like accidents or delays — we can begin to accept that setbacks will inevitably happen.

From that point forward, peace becomes possible.

This exercise is important because once we build this mental discipline, it carries into the rest of our lives. You develop the ability to deal with uncertainty, frustration, and inconvenience without losing control.

In that sense, traffic becomes more than an annoyance. It becomes practice for real life.

I often think of the scene in The Karate Kid where the protagonist must wax cars, paint fences, and sand floors — tasks that initially seem pointless. Over time, however, these small repetitions build muscle memory and prepare him for real combat.

That lesson does not only exist in fiction.

Experiences like traffic offer us the same opportunity: to quietly practice patience, presence, and acceptance — until those habits eventually shape how we face the rest of life.

Growing up in the U.S., I didn’t appreciate pimentón dulce, or paprika. Part of the reason is that it was so bland. Though things have improved over the years, the quality was very poor at that time; and it was why I, along with so many others, thought it was mainly a natural coloring agent. It’s strange how a bad version of something can make you distrust the thing itself.

This bland, or subtle, powdery flavor was an optional ingredient. But in spite of that reality, I had always loved paprika. I just didn’t know it.

It was present in almost every dish I ate. My grandmother would make her sofritos with Spanish chorizo, embedded with rich pimentón dulce. The redness from the spice, the smokiness, solidified taste and memory in my childhood and made every dish she cooked delicious.

Over time, I had less and less of it. Then I wrote off the spice entirely; whenever I’d try it, it wouldn’t taste like anything. It wasn’t until I traveled that I began to taste the real thing for what it was. The richness, boldness, and smokiness of paprika dominated dishes. With a tiny pinch, you could change the flavor into something new and memorable.

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Paprika is a unifying spice—you find it throughout global cuisines.

The bell pepper originated in Central Mexico, where indigenous peoples cultivated it for thousands of years before Spanish explorers brought it to Europe; pepper seeds are documented as arriving in Spain as early as 1493, following Columbus’s second voyage.

From Spain and Portugal, it spread across the continent, eventually reaching Hungary through Ottoman influence and the Balkans. There, it was named paprika, while the Spanish variation, pimentón dulce, evolved along its own path.

The spice traveled further still: it’s a foundational ingredient in Arabic cuisine, appearing in baharat, the aromatic spice blend used across the Middle East in dishes like shawarma and kofta, and even hummus carries it as a finishing touch. In Asia, it found its place too; paprika is a key ingredient in Indian tandoori spice blends, lending the dish its characteristic deep red color.

Since my resurgence of appreciation over the last several years, I’ve found the right places in the U.S. to get the best paprika I can; I have a drawer of pimentón dulce I bring back from Spain; and I include it, as a subtle addition or as the star of the dish, in almost every meal I make.

These experiences remind me of something about perception.

Often, we try something for the first time and don’t like it. But the ingredient or dish isn’t always the best representative of itself; you find out much later that it was simply poorly made.

Tinned fish is like this too. In the U.S., many people won’t touch canned sardines or anchovies. But when I consider the cans they would’ve picked up for the first time, I probably wouldn’t have either.

This is why, in every awkward experience with food, it’s critical to ask whether what you’re trying is the best representation. Only people who’ve grown up with a dish can tell you. It’s worth having those conversations, in person or in online communities.

Though, more than giving things a second chance or vetting your experience, this points to something more crucial: pride in quality and care for ingredients.

As things grow more expensive with inflation, and more scarce, it’s difficult for restaurants and stores to offer the best ingredients. While chefs and business owners value quality and respect for food, they can only do so much if consumers have a ceiling on price. But not everything needs to be expensive.

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Perhaps dishes could be simpler, or smaller in quantity. People don’t always want to stuff themselves; they want an experience they’ll remember. And I think things are moving in this direction; we can thank nutrition-conscious consumers for that.

People value quality when it comes to health, and this could be an avenue for richer experiences. It has already permeated the fast food industry, with places like Chipotle, known for its fresh ingredients and transparent sourcing, and Panda Express, which has made visible commitments to reduce artificial additives and offer lower-calorie options. Perhaps this will eventually translate to a broader demand for quality ingredients.

But to reach a consensus on valuing quality over cheapness and convenience, society has to transition from surface-level health-conscious choices to seeking genuine nutritional density. A 2004 study by researchers at the University of Texas, comparing USDA nutritional data from 1950 to 1999 across 43 garden crops, found reliable declines in protein, calcium, iron, and vitamin C over that half century; the result, researchers concluded, of breeding crops for yield rather than nutrition.

A bell pepper grown today is not quite the same bell pepper your grandmother bought. To compensate, a consumer would have to eat more of it and spend more money; when in fact a single, fresher pepper from a local farm would likely deliver more nutrition for the price.

Local purchasing, through sustainable farming practices, can help close this gap. But in industrialized countries, it’s difficult to find the same variety, options, and healthy market competition that would make this possible.

There is, of course, a counterargument. Local and artisanal food is not equally available to everyone; and for many families, the industrial grocery store, with its imperfect peppers and frozen bread, is not a compromise but a lifeline.

The romanticism of farmer’s markets and home-ground spices isn’t accessible to everyone based on time, location, and income. Critics of the local food movement point out that scaling sustainable farming to feed cities is not yet a solved problem; that supply chains, however flawed, have also made calories accessible in ways that weren’t possible a generation ago.

These are fair points. But I think they argue for better distribution of access, not for accepting a lower standard as the ceiling. The neighbor selling homemade bread isn’t trying to disrupt agriculture; she’s filling a hole for a solution that does not exist. And perhaps that’s where change has always started: not in policy, but in someone deciding to do the thing themselves.

So what is a person to do? Start from scratch. More and more, I see neighbors making their own bread with flour, water, and yeast, because out of the seven stores to buy food within a three-mile radius of my home, only one sells bread like that, and it’s frozen. So neighbors make their own and sell it to each other.

I make my own paprika. Though not as smoky as I’d like, it’s delicious and far more potent than anything I can buy here. I char the peppers on the grill, dry them, and blend them into a powder.

Others keep their own chickens for eggs, or get them from friends. My family knows a few friends in the rural parts of Okeechobee, and that has been wonderful; we enjoy the extra nutrition and the deep yellow yolks.

These small changes eventually influence the economy, and companies take notice. They may find ways to game the system, using language that makes ingredients technically accurate but far from what you’d imagine, but nonetheless, there is a movement, and it’s hopefully heading in the right direction.

In all, these experiences, and the pursuit of quality ingredients, bring back the case for reality and autonomy.

There will always be things that restrict us. And perhaps there’s only so much we can do. But when we find our own answer to the challenge, our own way of mending that hole, things become beautiful again, and they inspire others too.

Recently, I ordered a copy of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s historical murder mystery set in a 14th-century Italian abbey, where a learned friar must investigate a series of deaths. I had read it once through an audiobook, but I wanted it in my library for reference and a future re-read. The condition of the book, however, was not what I expected.

I ordered it used, listed as “acceptable.” In my experience, that category usually means some markings inside and maybe cover damage. But this one had far more damage than expected. I threw away the dust jacket and investigated whether the discoloration and blotches I saw were mold.

Jokingly, I posted about this and said there should be a new, lesser category for used books; something more honest, called “deplorables.” This was in jest. But it got me thinking about what we expect from used books, what we’re willing to tolerate, and more importantly, what we stand to gain from them—scribbles, damage and all.

The cheapest books built the biggest readers

The publishing industry has gone through its whirlwind of closed bookstores, ebooks, web reading, and many other innovations over the last thirty years. And through all of it, the industry has proven resilient; nowhere more visibly than in the recent resurgence of independent bookstores and reading culture itself, a quiet but steady reclaiming of the printed page.

But when the New York Times reported on the end of mass market paperbacks, avid readers across communities expressed their sadness and nostalgia for the medium.

Mass market books were the answer for single-use, convenient, quick, and cheap reading. You could stop by a store in the airport and find a popular read for under ten dollars. This medium helped advance literacy and accessibility, all while making reading more popular across the board.

Ebooks, audiobooks, and a publisher shift toward more profitable trade paperbacks have slowly killed the format. And while we gained many good things, there’s still something missing when formats like mass market paperbacks and used books fall into obscurity.

Thankfully, a damaged, used book on its last leg can serve as the mass market paperback replacement of the single-use read; and today, bookshops could advertise them as such.

Though it doesn’t match the aesthetic of the airport bookstore with its glossy magazines and new releases, something like these less-than-acceptable books can still serve readers in the same way mass market paperbacks once did.

But the beauty of these books doesn’t end with functionality. Used books, no matter the condition, offer a third dimension to reading.

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Another dimension and the argument for slowing down

The notes and scribbles that you find in used books offer a new glimpse into your reading experience. Unfortunately, annotation is a dying act. This shift was on full display when a TikToker confidently declared, "If you can't read a book without annotating it, you need help."

We have come to value speed; high reading goals, high book counts, over depth and absorption. When you annotate, you run contrary to that culture. A book that might take a few days to read now takes a few more.

But that raises the real question: what are you trying to get out of reading?

Beyond entertainment, if you’re after insight into the human condition, empathy, or genuine knowledge of a subject, you often don’t need to read more books; you need to read fewer, better ones and retain what you learned well enough to actually benefit from it.

Annotation forces you to think and process far beyond the surface of the text. The same is true of book clubs and classrooms, where dissecting a work and wrestling with it turns it into something that genuinely influences your life rather than passing through it.

The reader who uses footnotes reads a different book

To understand this new dimension, footnotes offer a useful parallel. When reading a book with footnotes, there’s an entire meta-layer to the experience.

The reader can learn more about a particular event, travel the rabbit holes of the subject, and gain a richer understanding of the text, much like an introduction or prologue, but on a detailed, granular level.

But footnotes are also something more than context. They are the original rabbit hole—the first technology that let a reader leave the text and return to it changed. In that sense, footnotes predate the hyperlink by centuries and do something the hyperlink never quite managed: they keep you inside the book. The rabbit hole has a floor. You go down, learn something, and surface back into the same sentence with new eyes. The internet’s version of this has no floor and rarely returns you to where you started.

What’s worth noticing is that footnotes, like annotations, are in decline. Academic texts still use them; popular nonfiction increasingly doesn’t. The reading culture that values speed and volume has little patience for the apparatus of depth. We have traded the digression—one of the great pleasures of serious reading—for frictionless forward motion. The same impatience that killed the footnote is what makes a stranger’s marginal notes feel like an intrusion rather than an invitation.

But this is precisely the first layer of what used books restore.

Someone already read this book. That’s the point.

These days, I prefer to buy used books because of this added context. A valuable used book will have highlights, notes, underlinings, and scribbles from a past reader; and more beneficially, sometimes from more than one reader.

As you read, you gain insight from someone else’s experience. If it’s an older copy, you also get a window into what someone was thinking five years ago, or even decades ago.

In my copy of The Conquest of Mexico, I found a De Molays membership card from possibly the 1960s tucked inside. I proudly leave it there because it tells a quiet story about previous owners. Along with old bookmarks, scribbles, and signatures, these traces add character and help build a breathing library.

@hellojohnpaulUsed books are my favorite because you never know what you’ll find inside. #booktok #vintage #history

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Every once in a while, I get my hands on a thoughtful reader who wrestled with the text and wrote those ideas down. I can read and join the journey with them; creating an experience no one else will have, because it’s my perspective, the author’s work, and another reader’s thoughts, time-capsulated together.

These experiences are never possible with new books, and it’s why choosing to purchase copies in old bookstores and online used stores offers so much more value to the reader.

The best gift you can give costs three dollars

I also find that gifting books I no longer need—or genuinely want to pass along to a friend—is far more sincere with my notes already inside.

When the friend receives the book and reads it, they’re getting my experience too, making the read intimate, as if I’ve invited them along for the ride. Seeing how much effort went into reading it—through the marked margins—they’ll also be more likely to appreciate the gift. And if we ever talk about it, they’ll already have some context on my perspective.

In many ways, this practice is a form of journaling. As you look at your library, you’re also looking at a piece of your consciousness.

Used books fix your attention span

Multi-dimensional reading offers a way out of this over-stimulated world; especially for those who struggle to focus for long periods of time. Between the text, a previous reader’s notes, and your own, you create healthy stimulation while re-regulating your mind.

This is a fully immersive experience. Even in waiting rooms, like at the doctor’s office, I find myself highlighting and marking away. It passes the time while keeping me entirely entertained and engaged, while others scroll their phones and let the time disappear with little to no value.

This practice also prevents unwanted skimming and poor retention. You process the work more slowly and thoughtfully. And when it’s time to re-read, you aren’t starting over; you’re digging deeper, with more life experience and education, finding new gems in the same work.

What the market for new books gets wrong

Some might say more books means more chances to find the ideas worth keeping—and there are occasions where that makes sense. If you’re newly curious about a subject and unsure how much you want to invest, skimming broadly has its place. But true retention comes from wrestling with ideas, from critical thinking.

It’s why an AI summary, a podcast episode, or a Wikipedia entry can tell you everything about a book without any of it sticking. You recognize the ideas in the moment and forget them shortly after.

Receiving books with notes and marginalia works on the same principle from the other direction; you piggyback on someone who has already walked the path you’re now on, inheriting a perspective you might never have found alone—while still bringing your own reading and your own notes to the encounter.

A market that only values new books misses this entirely. And when you look at your own library, it’s rarely the pristine copies you treasure most. It’s the ones that have aged, that have character; which is, not coincidentally, exactly the allure of vintage books.

Every book you annotate is a gift to a stranger

Collecting used books, and taking notes in the ones you have, is a community exercise. Someone has invested in you—whether they know it or not—by sharing their thoughts on a subject. We can do the same by recording our own thoughts for the future. Perhaps someone thirty years from now will find your copy in a thrift store and benefit from your experience.

As the publishing industry continues to change, we will always have used books to choose from. They offer more context, character, and connection for the reader. And that’s why I believe we should invest in them and champion their value, both for utility and for the added dimension they bring to reading.

I’ve been thinking a lot about opening lines lately, but in a new light, not like I was a few years ago. Before, we competed with a lot of noise from people. Now we’re competing with machines too. This has created even more saturation of ideas than I would’ve thought possible.

There’s interesting work being done with AI. But a lot of it succeeds because a great thinker or creative is using it as a tool. Then comes the slop: scammy videos, content, and interactions that sound like a rehash with little to no value.

We had this before, on a smaller scale. Clickbait articles promised celebrity scandals or scientific discoveries, only to waste our time with nothing. Now there’s more of it, designed more cleverly and easier to fall for.

This brings the opening line front and center again; our first communication doesn’t just need to be a hook, it needs to be human. It needs to be story-focused and truly connect with emotions.

We all have a message, something unique to us and something beautiful to say, and we deserve attention if it’s going to add value. But attention has to be proven and earned in a saturated space of ideas. The opening line, a human line, gives us that potential again to be a signal.

Several years ago, I studied hundreds of creative works and built a database in Notion containing hundreds of the best opening lines. Many vary in technique and style, but I’ve learned key attributes that make them all great. In our conversations, presentations, and moments when we share ideas, we encounter similar moments: first words that either earn attention or lose it.

Why some first lines last decades (while others die in seconds)

Almost every first line that has lasted includes a setting; either a place or time, usually within the first few words. If it doesn’t include a setting, it’s replaced with a shocking action or statement.

Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans opens:

“Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.’”

Stein carefully adds keywords that spark emotion. “Once” signals a specific scene worth our attention. The “angry” person who “dragged his father” creates a conflicting narrative that paints a complex picture we don’t understand, but now we’re asking questions. The orchard and ground add scenery and clear setting. Suddenly, there’s a fast forward: an old man, a whole life lived, forced to point out what happened with his father, using a tree as a physical anchor. This visceral setting, combined with emotions and mystery, locks you in.

Gabriel García Márquez does something similar:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

These lines have so much happening that we can’t help but ask ourselves a dozen questions. When? How? What kind of person would discover ice? These settings don’t just establish context; they reveal something about memory, violence, and wonder that couldn’t exist without them.

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The opening line formula machines can’t replicate

The greatest opening lines, the human ones, create tension where audiences have to read between the lines. And while a hundred people might read the same sentence, it means something totally different based on their experience. These sentences are universal, yet personal.

J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan opens with stark simplicity:

“All children, except one, grow up.”

It challenges what we take for granted about time and loss.

Toni Morrison does the same in Paradise:

“They shoot the white girl first.”

In just a few words, we’re confronting racial hierarchy, violence, and the mechanisms of choosing victims.

George Orwell’s 1984 shows us something wrong immediately:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

This line eases us into the familiar (a bright cold day in April) before emphasizing thirteen at the end, an unlucky number, and the plural “clocks” signifying the world’s time all syncing into one. We recognize the wrongness before we understand it.

Renata Adler opens Speedboat with a different kind of precision:

“Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages.”

The starkness of absence reveals how we measure meaning; by what happens, or by what doesn’t.

How conflict reveals you’re human

This tension that makes great opening lines should also reveal true conflict.

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time opens with this:

“It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed.”

We’re already asking questions, wondering how (or if) the dog died, who did it, what Mrs. Shears is going to think. The precision of “7 minutes after midnight” tells us we’re in the mind of someone who sees the world differently. Conflict doesn’t just fuel the story, but also reveals character.

The one question that creates an unforgettable opening

For me, this revised take on opening lines that goes beyond hooks (perhaps it’s always been the case) reveals that readers and listeners have always valued truth, authenticity, and real human storytelling.

I find now that instead of writing on something that’s particularly interesting to me, I have to have a personal experience or connection to it first. And that’s a good thing. Because these personal experiences create something new that didn’t exist before, I can add value to something and contribute.

Now, when I want to communicate an idea or message, I ask myself: What is my personal struggle with this? How am I trying to apply it? Or how does this subject fascinate me, and how have I interacted with it on my own? It’s these differences that create a unique message, one worth an original opening line and story.

There are many amazing opening lines in creative works. We can craft our own for the moments when we share ideas, present our work, or communicate what matters to us.

But here’s what machines can’t replicate: the specific gravity of lived experience, the particular angle of your curiosity, the exact pressure point where your struggle meets someone else’s question. A machine can generate a thousand openings in a second. The only one that matters is the one that only you could have written.

The entire U.S. has recently experienced freezing temperatures and storms. While I sympathize with those enduring extreme temperatures, we’ve experienced new realities here in Florida.

We’ve caught some of the cold front, and our winter winds look quite different. Iguanas fall out of the air, stunned; boa constrictors freeze and die in the wetlands; young tropical trees die; and the sight of flurries and frozen car hoods eerily exists in a place they don’t belong.

Beyond the reptiles, the quiet victims are the plants. And watching how residents respond to the freezing threats these temperatures bring has been revealing.

Limited bags, limited time

As the news shared about temperatures below the freezing point—in the twenties Fahrenheit—locals with plant life took to Facebook and similar platforms to share ideas on how to protect their plants from dying.

Many recommended covering them with plastic bags or trash bags, or bringing them inside if possible. Throughout the neighborhood, I could see bags covering orchids attached to palm trees, bags on hedges, lemon trees, herb gardens, and papaya trees.

What was interesting, however, was seeing what people chose to save.

While the media talked of these temperatures, not everyone had the time to think over what that meant; these were temperatures colder than in a decade, so few people knew what to do. Bags and time were limited. Some people chose to save a few trees and plants while allowing others to suffer or die.

In my case, I protected my orchids and fruit trees. The herb garden was another story.

I didn’t have enough bags or time, as the wet, humid temperatures dropped the night before, to cover it all. So I chose the most vulnerable and the ones that were more difficult to protect in our climate: the basil, parsley, and cilantro. The hardier Caribbean oregano, a tall dill plant, and some small pepper plants were fully exposed. The dill plant didn’t make it, nor did the Caribbean oregano. But those were the easiest for me to reproduce and care for.

When instinct takes over

In life, there are more extreme versions of this.

Think of a family on vacation.

If toddlers escape their parents’ grasp and board a train at a station, and there’s no time—gut instinct will make them leave all their other belongings to save the kids. These moments are defining for each of us because they reveal what’s most important.

If you get terminally ill, for example, your entire perspective on life and your appreciation for general health change overnight. When someone is on their deathbed, they’re thinking of the most important things: family, relationships, and legacy.

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Ancient tests of truth

We can look to ancient records for more examples of this, like King Solomon’s account of the two mothers. When two women claimed the same child, and the king had to decide who was telling the truth, he proposed ending the matter by killing the child.

His ploy worked because one mother broke down with desperation and offered to give the child to the other woman to save the life. This is a freezing moment, when an immediate threat reveals your core truth.

For Cleopatra in Egypt, she had to decide if capture was worth what she believed in and her legacy. Instead, she chose to retain her image and autonomy and took her own life (traditionally said to be by asp bite, though historians debate whether poison or other means were used).

What fiction shows us

In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, J.R. Isidore excitedly shows a rare living spider he found to the fugitive androids, but Pris Stratton casually begins mutilating it by cutting off its legs one by one with scissors to test how few it needs to function.

The androids watch impassively with no empathy or concern for the creature’s suffering, starkly revealing their artificial nature and lack of genuine compassion. Horrified, Isidore eventually snatches the mutilated spider and drowns it to end its agony, highlighting how this immediate threat to innocent life exposes the fundamental difference between human empathy and android indifference.

In Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka’s golden ticket contest and factory tour serve as a series of clever tests that reveal each child’s true character when faced with wonder, rules, and temptation. While the other four children give in to greed, gluttony, entitlement, and obsession—leading to their colorful (but harmless) exits—Charlie stays humble, kind, and honest throughout.

In the final moment of choice, he returns the priceless Everlasting Gobstopper instead of selling it to Wonka’s rival, proving his integrity and earning the entire factory as Wonka’s worthy successor.

Beyond the moment

In reality, freezing points are defining moments. But unlike what we think of as defining moments—having little time to make a decision and therefore proving your character—a freezing point doesn’t have to be a moment. A freezing point is the realization of what is truly important: if you got rid of everything, what is essential? What would you do to secure that essential?

This is not minimalism. It’s recognizing the importance of your core identity, your needs, and the people around you, and what you would do to protect it.

José de San Martín, the Argentine liberator of South America in the early 19th century, faced a defining crossroads in 1822 after his victories. Meeting Simón Bolívar in Guayaquil, he could have claimed power, pursued rivalry, or sought personal glory over the fragile new republics. Instead, he voluntarily resigned command, stepped aside, and exiled himself to Europe—prioritizing continental unity and freedom above his own ambition, revealing that his core truth was selfless service to the greater cause.

The intense pressure of the encounter stripped away all distractions and forced an instant, instinctive revelation of what was truly essential to him—freedom for the continent over personal legacy—much like the sudden clarity that comes when everything else is at risk of being lost.

The practice of clarity

I’ve found that the closer we can identify these freezing points, the more we can enjoy life and those around us; the more likely we can grow what matters and protect it. By identifying these pillars, we can avoid the “how did I get here?” or “how did I miss this?” crises.

The best way to find these points is by seeking temporary solitude. This helps you meditate on what is essential. As Michel de Montaigne puts it in “On Solitude”:

“If you do not first lighten yourself and your soul of the weight of your burdens, moving about will only increase their pressure on you, as a ship’s cargo is less troublesome when lashed in place.”

By isolating yourself from external noise, you can focus on the essential parts of life. Then, imagine yourself on an island, with only a few people and items to take.

What would they be? And if you really did find yourself stranded on an island, what would count as your legacy? What would be most important about yourself?

If you are the same person stranded on an island as you are today, then you’ve centered your true self and value the right things, and only then can you identify your freezing point.

Disclaimer: This essay shares my personal experience with water fasting and is not medical advice. Water fasting can be dangerous if done improperly or without adequate preparation. It may not be for you.

If you have a history of eating disorders, disordered eating, or use food restriction to manage difficult emotions, please do not read further. This essay and practice are not for you and could be harmful.

Before attempting any extended fast, consult with a healthcare professional and do thorough research. Do not attempt water fasting if you have underlying health conditions, are pregnant, or take medications that require food intake. Results can vary widely, and mine might not be typical. This essay is about why fasting mattered to me in a specific season, not a recommendation that others pursue the same path.

I’ve always wanted to do a water-only fast, but the literature online always discouraged it. I don’t blame content for making water fasting sound dangerous. It can be. But that’s only if you haven’t done the research and you start off extreme. If you approach water fasting carefully and properly, it can be a meaningful experience. In fact, for me, it’s been an experience I never want to forget.

When I ended 2025, I wanted to try my first strict water fast.

I had a few reasons, but it was mainly spiritual and a desire to deny the noise we all face day-to-day. I tried a 48-hour fast, then switched to OMAD (only dinners, so about 23-24 hour fasts) for several days, then did another 48-hour fast, and a 72-hour water fast. Since then, the experience has changed my life to the point where fasting has become a recurring, meaningful practice in my life

While I know water fasting isn’t for everyone, I do think some people will recognize themselves in this—and consider what kind of fasting is wise for their season. Water fasting, no matter the reason, is an act of self-denial; it gives us agency back in a world that pulls us in many different directions, begging for our loyalty, money, and attention.

Why water fasting worked for me when other fasts didn't

Unlike most fasts, a complete water fast is the ultimate denial of the most fundamental human needs. By denying your most basic needs, you’re forced to practice discipline in all parts of your life, from the ground up.

For example, even after my fasts, I was less likely to eat food that was not good for me. I started rethinking portion sizes and realized the overabundance and consumption of food throughout my own life and even at the average restaurant. During the fast, I used my phone less, mitigated my social media use, and exercised my patience and restraint.

One example of improved restraint was with my relationships. If I were to be irritated before, during the fast I was more patient to work through any challenges. There was a posture of “I can’t control what I can’t control” and allowing myself to live more freely and confidently.

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Digital detoxes don’t work (here’s why water fasting does)

Water fasting wasn’t my only kind of fast. I’ve done restricted foods and I’ve done fasts like digital detoxing. While I think fasts like digital detox are valuable—any kind of fast, for that matter—I think they are only peripheral when it comes to long-term results.

Digital fasts, for example, are only treating the symptom of a greater problem: dopamine addiction.

We use the phone too much or listen to podcasts or use social media for hours a day, and this addiction to stimulation has a devastating effect on attention spans and mental health.

The logical choice, of course, seems to be to eliminate those things. But unfortunately, that’s the wrong part of the habit cycle.

Charles Duhigg explains habits in The Power of Habit through a cycle: the cue, the routine, and the reward.1

Often, we try to replace the whole habit. For digital detoxes, for example, we might get bored (the cue), and then because of that we spend time on social media (the routine), and the reward is feeling entertained, appreciated, or wanted through those digital social connections. In a digital detox, we focus too much on the full habit.

Duhigg suggests keeping the cue and reward but replacing the routine, which is much easier than replacing an entire habit. For example, if you get bored (the cue), your routine changes by reading a book instead of picking up your phone, and in turn, the reward is feeling mental stimulation from learning something new.

When you apply these principles, you can replace digital bad habits. But unfortunately, you have not learned to eliminate the cue and desire for reward altogether.

With a water fast, you’re focusing on a foundational human need. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it’s the first tier of physiological needs. And by eliminating meals, snacks, and sugary drinks, you’re left with almost nothing but temptation and hunger. You are living with a cue that goes unsatisfied. You can walk instead of eat, but walking does not meet your need. This is a fundamentally different challenge than putting your phone away. And while both fasts are helpful, a water fast offers a more holistic and complete experience.

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Sometimes you need to throw a grenade where you’re standing

Last year, my wife and I experienced a late miscarriage, followed by a new pregnancy and two difficult seasons of extreme anxiety. I'm in a much better place now, but at the time, I needed something that could break through the noise. I knew that the normal patterns and breaks would not work for me. I couldn’t find true rest or a restart.

The author Renata Adler states in Speedboat:

“I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.”

This, for me, was water fasting. It eliminated every distraction, even indirectly, by constantly denying food and continuously pushing hunger to the back of my mind.

Unexpected to me, I didn’t know water fasting would become so necessary in my life in such a short period.

This experience, in many ways, is like someone visiting a country for the first time and falling in love with it. They didn’t know they needed it or wanted it, but now it’s all they can think about—they want to go back.

Looking back now with more stability and perspective, I can see that fasting gave me what therapy, rest, and other interventions hadn't—a complete reset that allowed me to process grief and anxiety more effectively.

What the science actually says about water fasting

While the best science, in my opinion, is what you experience with your body, the scientific field offers interesting insights into the benefits of a water fast.

Physical health

Water fasting can trigger autophagy, a process where the body breaks down and recycles old cellular components. While some research suggests autophagy may play a role in cellular health and disease prevention, the science is still evolving and the direct benefits in humans remain an area of active study.

According to a 2024 review published in Nutrition Reviews by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, prolonged water fasting (5-20 days) produces mild to moderate weight loss of 2-10%, with consistent reductions in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure. The review, which analyzed eight human trials, found that in adults without diabetes, water fasting improves glycemic control markers, including fasting glucose, fasting insulin, insulin resistance, and HbA1c levels, while also increasing circulating ketones that may have protective cardiovascular effects.

Mental health

Water fasting not only promises benefits for physical health but also mental health. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Nutrition, Fasting & Health examined the psychological effects of fasting on 300 university students in Iran. Researchers Nasiri and Lotfi measured students’ mental health and aggression control before and after a fasting period, finding significant improvements across both measures. The effect sizes were substantial at 0.89 for mental health and 0.88 for aggression control, suggesting that fasting has profound impacts on psychological well-being beyond physical health benefits.

Spiritual health

Fasting has always been part of spiritual practices, and it’s one of the best ways to renew your soul and connect with something greater than yourself.

St. Basil the Great, a fourth-century bishop and theologian, viewed fasting as a holistic spiritual discipline engaging both body and soul. For Basil, true fasting extends beyond physical abstinence from food and drink—it requires simultaneously abstaining from evil thoughts, anger, and sinful behaviors.

He believed that prolonged fasting creates a pathway for spiritual transformation by lightening the body’s demands and shutting off external distractions, allowing the mind to become immersed in heavenly contemplation. The bishop said in On Fasting:

“For satiety brings delight to the stomach, whereas fasting brings profit to the soul.”

Basil emphasizes that extended periods of strict fasting actively facilitate deeper communion with the divine. This understanding positions water fasting not as deprivation but as liberation—freeing the practitioner from bodily appetites and daily noise to pursue higher spiritual realities.

Here is how I prepared for my water fast

In the beginning of my journey, after reviewing the benefits of fasting, I started my first fast. I had my brother-in-law do it with me, so I had some encouragement, and we pushed through 48 hours.

It was a difficult fast because I didn’t do the research on how to sustain myself. Now, through proper preparation, I am more confident in my fasting and actually find 48-hour fasts much easier and more enjoyable.

The fast, I’ve found, starts the day before

It’s a time to prepare your body and mind to be without food for an extended time. I find that eating lighter portions and weaning off carbs helps my body transition to no food. It’s also important to start drinking more water so you aren’t playing catch-up with hydration when you’ve only just started the fast.

As I go through my fast, electrolytes play an important role. Anyone fasting will lose a lot of salts, so it’s important to replenish them so you don’t get headaches. With about 2-3 liters of water a day, I take Celtic salt, potassium chloride (“Nu Salt”), and magnesium glycinate.

This mixture has ensured I haven’t had a headache since my first fast. I found the right measurements by plugging it into Grok (or any AI) and getting personal recommendations. (Everyone's needs are different and what worked for me may not work for you—work with a healthcare provider to determine what's appropriate for your situation.)

Along with preparing physically and digestively, I prepare my mind. I often pick a book I will focus on that represents a theme in my life. By providing a goal through these themes for your mind and spirit, you can focus on something important going on in your season. For example, if you needed to make a big decision about a relationship or a job, then use that time to focus on it, meditate, and pray on it.

The final part that truly helps me prepare for a water fast is community support. I find doing the fast with someone you trust is a great first step. Then, as you get more serious, finding a community that has vastly more experience than you do with water fasting is super helpful.

The Reddit community r/WaterFasting has been tremendous for me in learning more about water fasting on a physical level. I have also connected with members in the channel to dig deeper into learnings, spiritual practices, and more.

Why you should tell no one (almost) about your fast

If you’re fasting for spiritual reasons, a core tenet is keeping it secret. This is to prevent pride and other desires from taking over, and wanting glory for being disciplined. But this tenet should not be limited to spiritual fasting—humility plays a vital role in the fasting journey.

If you readily tell others about your fasting, you remove much of the self-denial of basic human needs. Though you are still with hunger, you’re replacing the satisfaction of fullness with emotional stimulation. Instead of looking for physical subsistence, you’re seeking abstract social approval, and therefore receiving stimuli from it. This only hurts your water fasting.

Instead, telling someone you trust—in case they see you going too far in your practice for health reasons—is the best way to go about fasting. If someone asks why you aren’t eating, you can say you aren’t hungry or are abstaining from the meal at that time. If they push you for more information, you can humbly and quietly explain that you are on a temporary fast. I have found this to be the best practice.

What 72 hours without food actually feels like

Once I understood how to prepare myself for a fast and how to sustain myself, I immediately noticed the benefits.

I felt like I was experiencing something in 3D. I also noticed I had more control over impulses and general anxiety, and I was in a happier mood. What surprised me most was how these benefits persisted even after returning to normal eating—the clarity and emotional regulation didn't disappear when the fast ended.

On a spiritual level, I felt much closer to God and in tune with many of the challenges I was going through. I felt more of a sense of confidence and less desire to have control in my life.

The moment you break your fast changes everything

The minute I refed by enjoying some broth and then slowly introducing solid foods, I began to feel blood back in my cheeks.

While on the fast I felt like everything was in hyperfocus; after eating, I felt like that focus aligned and became centered and more clear—if that makes sense. I felt a boost of energy, and the benefits of fasting still lingered in me for a while.

The new habits and experiences, I found, stuck with me.

Today, I see the differences in the lessons and experiences I have learned through each fast. By combining intentionality (like a focus) with purpose and a goal for the fast, I’ve been able to enjoy a more fulfilling and clearer life.

Telling others about fasting

Because of these experiences, I see the value in spreading the word about water fasting. While I always wanted to do this, I wasn’t reminded about water fasting until I met my friend Jessie at Versailles in Miami.2

We were going to meet up for lunch, but he had not told me he was fasting. I, of course, was starving, so I enjoyed my meal (to date, I feel awful eating in front of him), but I was a little disoriented by him agreeing to the plans, knowing what we would do and where we were going. I now fully understand because one of the hardest parts of fasting is not sharing it with everyone, but being in a weird situation when people wonder why you aren’t eating during an event.

He had an espresso and a Perrier.

I remember appreciating that discipline, and while I didn’t think about it much after, the experience stuck in my mind and subconsciously planted a seed for water fasting. This moment encourages me to share with others why any kind of water fasting—multi-day or intermittent—can make a big difference, especially during a crucial part of your life.

Where I’m going from here (and why you should start small)

When I visit communities like r/WaterFasting, I see much longer fasts.3 These are risky, but perhaps one day I’ll make it a life accomplishment with the right strategy and supervision. For now, my goal is a 7-day fast. I believe this is doable for me and reachable as I work my way up.

What started as a one-time experience during a difficult season has become a practice I return to intentionally. And while everyone may not be able to do a water fast for health reasons, I do believe we can all practice some sort of self-sacrifice to replenish our bodies, mind, and soul.

Final reminder: Water fasting is a serious practice that requires proper preparation, research, and medical supervision. This essay reflects my personal journey and should not be taken as medical advice. If you have any health concerns, consult a healthcare professional before attempting any form of extended fasting.

I remember vividly, on multiple occasions, flying on an international flight for about nine hours. I’d read a little, but the ever-tempting micro screen in front of me on the seat looked so alluring, so easy, that I’d turn it on and browse for movies.

After I watched the first movie, it was hard to stop. I’d watch one after another, eventually watching several until the pilot announced the descent.

I usually don’t eat on planes because of bad experiences with food poisoning and a generally upset stomach. That, combined with staring at a screen and some sleep deprivation, gives me an immediate migraine after landing—one so strong it’ll last over a day if I don’t take medicine.

In these moments, I realize just how damaging technology can be, even in its facade of helpfulness. For some reason, technology often works against our biological needs.

Blue light screens disrupt our sleep. Social media apps promise entertainment, but their addictive algorithms create major issues for our dopamine systems. Fast food delivery apps offer convenience but make it harder to eat healthy at home and responsibly steward our budgets.

Discipline and balance help us get the good out of these technologies while minimizing the bad. But what we see over time is that more suitable technology often exists, and the ones we use today are designed for maximum consumption, not for our healthiest selves.

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Take e-ink, for example

E-ink technology makes reading feel like a natural experience. There’s no blue light, and you can read without distraction. Originally, this tech was a single-use innovation. But now dumb phones and AI assistants use the technology. You can use these devices to do the basics that a modern person can’t live without—GPS, email—all on an e-ink screen.

Yet tech companies and modern demand see these as niche products. Though if things continue moving the way they are—with Gen Z wanting to spend less time on social media and people generally looking for human interaction—I believe e-ink is the future.

This movement doesn’t need to limit itself to e-ink, though. Technology has to start with biological needs so it works to enhance us, not work against us.

Technology should start with your biology, not end with it

Today, technology often serves dopamine. Like a drug, it provides excitement but rarely offers long-term sustainability. Our sleep suffers, as do our mental and physical health. Instead, technology should focus on optimal living.

Why most “solutions” to screen addiction don’t work

This kind of technology doesn’t mean tacking on Do Not Disturb buttons or placing time restrictions on devices. That’s just patching or mitigating a problem—like a smoker who goes through two packs a day choosing to smoke three fewer cigarettes. It’s marginally helpful and doesn’t solve the core addiction.

Plus, we’re now finding that some of these steps aren’t even helpful. A report on children from the American Academy of Pediatrics confirms what many parents already suspect: screen time limits alone are no longer enough. The issue isn’t just how long kids stare at screens, but how platform designs—autoplay features, algorithmic feeds, endless notifications—are engineered to hijack attention and override healthier activities.

This calls on all of us to take a step back and ask why we choose a particular technology and what it will ultimately do to us. Are the benefits worth the downsides? And how can we maximize benefits while making the risks as minimal as possible?

We can try this patchwork approach, but we can also start from the beginning by choosing technology that puts human nature first. This type of tech can build us up and support us from the ground up.

This is why I find e-ink so satisfying—it’s one of the most natural states technology can provide. It’s like reading a book, which has existed in many forms since early civilization wrote on clay tablets. It also has clear limitations with processing power and running certain apps, full of tiny delays or limited graphics; limitations that prevent the everyday overconsumption we see with conventional screens.

These examples bring up important points. Technology should be practical, purposeful, and natural. If a device does too much, it becomes counterintuitive to what we need.

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The simple truth nobody wants to hear about screens

As King Solomon said, to paraphrase: life is simple; humans made it complicated. That’s what complex technology does to us. Comedian Jimmy Carr recently spoke about how if you take away screens, you feel like you’re in the 1970s again. There’s no cool app, social network, or generative AI. And this is what so many people crave when they think of the days when you spent more time outside or interacted with more people.

I deeply connected with what Carr said. In my personal experience, I feel this on a blue-skied Saturday morning. My wife and kids and I all jump into the car and drive to the beach. Thanks to the sand, we don’t want to have our phones exposed to elements that scratch the screen, nor do we want it in the sun, so it’s tucked away somewhere deep in a beach bag in a ziplock bag. There is no technology. We enjoy the sun and the wind and the water. If we have more family or friends with us, we engage in conversation for hours.

Recently, we almost saw a Blue Origin rocket launch from the shore and spoke with a photographer waiting for the moment (though it got canceled). On that same day, we played the card game version of Monopoly. This was a life one could live in the ‘90s, and it was entirely accessible to us. There’s school, work, and other things that require us to stay connected with technology, but many of those things can also have boundaries and mitigation. When planning for a project at work, for example, start with pen and paper, and only when you have a clear idea start working on the computer.

Next time I board that nine-hour flight, I’ll know better. An e-ink reader instead of the seat-back screen. A book instead of autoplay. Maybe even just the thoughts I’ve been too distracted to think. No migraine waiting at the gate, no lost day recovering, but the clarity that comes from technology designed for humans, not against them. E-ink isn’t the future because it’s innovative. It’s the future because the best technology often feels like no technology at all.

There is something uncomfortable about watching someone learn.

Learning is slow, awkward, and full of visible gaps. It resists the clean arcs we prefer to present in public. That discomfort surfaced recently when a popular streamer, Kai Cenat, was mocked online for stopping mid-reading to look up a word while reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.

The moment itself was ordinary. Cenat’s goal was simple: to read aloud and improve his articulation so he could become a better speaker. But the reaction was revealing. While some framed the pause as ignorance, the reading community and learners in general responded with overwhelming support.

That response points to something deeper.

People do not merely tolerate vulnerability; they value it.

More than that, the moment highlights the importance of learning when you do not know, and why it is acceptable, even necessary, to do that learning in public, especially when you are not good at something yet.

Learning in public can feel like choosing exposure. You use an audience as accountability and risk judgment along the way. But it also offers forms of growth and virtue that are difficult to find anywhere else.

The desire for wisdom before appearance

Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and civil rights leader, did not know how to read until he decided to learn, despite literacy being illegal for enslaved people at the time. History remembers him for his moral clarity and political courage, but at his core, Douglass was also a radical learner.

He openly described his education as fragmented and incomplete. He learned from scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, overheard conversations, and borrowed texts. Rather than hiding those gaps, he acknowledged them and worked through them.

Critics noticed. Many attacked him not on moral grounds, but intellectual ones, even claiming he could not have written his own speeches. These accusations were false, and Douglass refused to let them derail him.

Instead, he made his learning visible.

He tested ideas out loud, refined arguments in front of live audiences, and adjusted tone, pacing, and vocabulary over time. For Douglass, learning was not about appearing educated. It was about becoming free. That openness shaped his legacy. We remember him not as someone who emerged fully formed, but as someone who became who he was through sustained effort and public growth.

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Choosing to learn in public

A modern expression of this idea appeared in the “building in public” movement. Entrepreneurs, creators, and thinkers chose to develop their projects openly, sharing progress, setbacks, decisions, and outcomes with their audiences in real time.

Creators associated with ideas like Small Bets, by Daniel Vassallo, use this approach by explaining what they are building and why, while also sharing struggles, wins, and processes along the way. This transparency helps others learn, but it also creates trust and momentum as projects grow.

What is notable is where this practice stops.

While building in public is now common in business, it is far less visible in areas that feel more personal. People might share weight loss or fitness progress, but it is rare to see someone openly sharing struggles with reading, speaking, or learning itself.

The risk and the responsibility of visibility

One reason is obvious. The internet can be cruel. There are well-known cases, like Rebecca Black, where young people shared creative work publicly and were subjected to years of ridicule and harassment. That kind of environment discourages openness.

Still, as internet users, we have more agency than we think. We can choose platforms, communities, and corners of the internet that attract the right people. And beyond that, we have collective responsibility.

Even if we cannot eliminate negativity, we can defend and encourage those who take the risk of being vulnerable. Just as importantly, we can participate in our own visible learning journeys.

Maybe you are an excellent reader but uncomfortable with public speaking. You might practice by giving toasts, reading aloud in small groups, or posting recordings of your progress. Doing so creates accountability, invites helpful feedback, and often draws encouragement from people who recognize themselves in your effort.

Why learning in public matters

Learning in public is a deeply human experience. It is why we are drawn to stories, whether books, films, or biographies. We do not connect with perfection. We connect with struggle, growth, and empathy.

Sharing learning publicly allows others to witness that process in real time. They do not just watch outcomes. They watch becoming. And in doing so, they often feel inspired to begin, or continue, their own journeys.

It is true that most people are too focused on their own lives to pay close attention. But it is also true that many people are quietly looking for examples of courage. They do not need flawless heroes. They need visible ones.

When you learn in public, you often discover you are not alone. Others reach out with similar struggles and goals. Communities form. From there come deeper human connections, shared projects, unexpected opportunities, and continued growth.

We can all choose something to learn in public. Once we decide what that is, we can set goals focused not on outcomes, but on consistency and progress. By sharing along the way, we give others permission to do the same. Sometimes, that is enough to start something larger than ourselves.

Throughout my life, I tried to journal. I enjoyed writing down my thoughts and seeing my growth and journey over time. But I always wrestled with the practice.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to journal. Should I write each day by listing activities and everything I did? Or should I write about key moments when they came? How personal should I be? Over time, I developed my own style, which became a mix of daily events and my thoughts about the things I was struggling with or aiming for.

But even with these improvements, I still journaled in seasons. I would write consistently for months, then stop for months. It wasn’t until I adopted microjournaling that my entire habit changed. Instead of writing on and off, I found myself writing consistently—and often more than once a day.

Microjournaling is the practice of writing smaller entries about specific thoughts and ideas throughout the day. It functions more like a stream of consciousness than a polished, formal, long-form entry.

Part of my challenge with journaling was believing the writing wasn’t useful. It helped with thinking and mental health, I would argue, but then it seemed to disappear. Over time, I realized those entries were often seeds for future social posts, essays, and entire positions with real meaning and signal. Microjournaling helped make that connection clear.

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Capturing the moment before it fades

The practice removes the pressure of fancy, formalized writing. Your mind no longer has to stay cluttered throughout the day because, as soon as you have an idea, a thought, or a piece of information someone shares with you, you can put it on paper. It isn’t perfect. You express yourself in the moment. And, in a way, you are living the words Frank Herbert writes in Dune:

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”

The best way I imagine microjournaling is through Ernest Hemingway. Throughout his career, he was known for writing down his experiences. After an interesting conversation, he would often hurry to a quiet place to capture the scene from memory. Many of these moments later sparked fictionalized scenes in his work.

The author Natalie Goldberg also describes this practice when you face challenges. She says, “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

What we lose when nothing is recorded

If you’ve ever looked back on a period of your life, such as middle school, the years of raising toddlers, or buying your first home, the memories often exist only in broad strokes. You remember emotions, a few random details, key highlights, and a general sense of that time. But over time, much of it disappears. This is a personal loss first, but it is also a loss to everyone around you.

Think of presidents, historic authors, and people who have shaped the world. Schools and universities dedicate entire courses and programs to studying their works and actions, sometimes prolific and sometimes sparse. We analyze what they were thinking and speculate about what they might think today. The more these individuals recorded their inner lives, the more we are able to understand them and allow that understanding to shape our own lives and world. This is a gift. As George R. R. Martin writes, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.” The same is true of reading journals, letters, and personal records.

Tragically, recording our own lives and moments is more difficult than it seems. Pure documentation is not the problem. We bury our phones in photos, messages, and endless data points. Yet this abundance can work against us. A Psychological Science study once found that when we take photos, we tend to remember less of what happened, trading presence for preservation. Much of this paradox has to do with intention and attention.

Microjournaling restores both by adding reflection to the act of recording and turning moments into meaning rather than mere artifacts.

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Tools that let thought move freely

In my own microjournaling experience, tools have made a big difference. I tried handwriting, but it felt slow and messy. I even tried e-ink writing with the Kindle Scribe, but writing while holding the device wore down the felt stylus and eventually bent the tablet from pressure. Typing, by contrast, was fast but felt impersonal and filled with distractions.

Instead, I relied on the iOS Notes app. It has a simple, sticky-note-like design that lets me write whatever I need, no matter how short or long. I can organize notes into folders, add searchable hashtags, and rely on automatic metadata for future reference.

When I want to think without the distraction of my phone, I use an e-ink smart typewriter. This has been a major development for me. I type quickly and freely, then access the file on my computer, scan it for grammar issues, and move it into my Notes app. Some of these notes grow into larger ideas, projects, or even essays like this one.

Short writing, clear thinking

Microjournaling is for everyone, especially in the modern age. Everything is short-form. And while short-form consumption can be damaging over time, short-form writing supports two clear goals:

1. Getting your thoughts out quickly

2. Practicing the discipline of clear thinking and writing

For these reasons, I see microjournaling as a key skill. It doesn’t need to replace traditional journaling; the two can work side by side.

Traditional journaling is long-form. It’s well-suited for recounting experiences, telling stories, and developing fully formed ideas. While it may not need to be a daily habit, a consistent rhythm, like weekly, offers immense value for reflection and record-keeping.

If you practice both together, it might look like this:

• Traditional: Reflect after a period of time with a bird’s-eye view, or recount a long, detailed scene.

• Micro: Record notable thoughts, emotions, and key information, the seeds for larger works like traditional journaling, essays, or reflective social posts.

Both formats are useful, but I value microjournaling more because it is accessible and doable, regardless of someone’s busyness or stage of life. Over time, it naturally feeds into deeper reflection and traditional journaling, offering many of the same benefits.

When small notes start to accumulate

Microjournaling also compounds. Over time, it creates a collection with recurring themes. These small entries can eventually become some of the most valued works we know, collections like Meditations, Ecclesiastes, or memoirs like A Moveable Feast.

These larger works, revised and shaped for others, are possible for anyone. Even if they’re never shared publicly, they can influence family, friends, and future generations.

One project that emerged from this practice is my genealogical research. Several years ago, I began building my family tree. That led to finding relatives around the world, visiting them, forming deep relationships, and taking overseas road trips. I uncovered major discoveries, including 150-year-old family homes. I recorded all of this and am now working on a memoir-like record that will never be published. It’s for me, my family, and future generations. It is my story for them.

Letting the practice stay messy

There are moments when it’s tempting to impose structure or themes on microjournaling, but that defeats the point. Micro entries should be messy. Their purpose is to record thoughts, emotions, ideas, and information. Over time, patterns emerge, and larger projects take shape.

But the deeper value of microjournaling may not be personal at all. We live in a moment that documents everything and understands very little. Our lives are captured constantly, but rarely interpreted. If fewer people leave behind private records of how they thought, doubted, and changed, the future will inherit an archive of images without context and words without inner life. Microjournaling is a small act, but it pushes against that silence. It preserves not just what happened, but how it felt to live through it.

I purchased my second car, only a few months used, at Off Lease in 2011. I kept it for years and enjoyed it, especially after I paid it off. Over time, the paint faded, and eventually I noticed faint rust spots along the edge of the hood and across the top of the car.

At first, I ignored it. That is, until it became impossible to overlook; through neighbors’ wandering eyes and the occasional comment from friends. What finally pushed me to act wasn’t embarrassment, but the desire for the car to last longer. I wanted to keep it going. So I repainted it in its original color, and now it looks brand new.

This experience isn’t unique.

People all over the world live with rust on their vehicles, though what it means varies widely. In some places, older, rusted cars are the norm; not by choice, but by necessity. Replacement isn’t an option, so care (or acceptance of rust) becomes a habit.

In others, rust feels almost intentional, like in parts of Appalachia, where work ethic and visible signs of use are valued, and a worn car can signal virtue rather than neglect.

These differences extend beyond cars.

Rust appears everywhere; playground equipment worn smooth by hands, grills left out through summers and storms, screws in outdoor furniture, drill bits dulled by years of use. Anything exposed long enough to time and weather will eventually show it.

And yet, when we instinctively fight rust, we often miss what it represents; or what it quietly does to the things and memories we care about.

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II. The pressure to replace what’s old

Most of us don’t wait for rust anymore. We replace things long before they fall apart. Often, we replace them before they even show a scratch, because of a new update, a design change, or a shift in style.

The clearest example is the phone in our pockets.

An iPhone still works. The screen isn’t cracked. The battery lasts most of the day. And yet, every few years, a quiet pressure sets in. A new model arrives; the camera is sharper, the edges are cleaner, and the device is thinner, faster, and smoother.

Nothing is wrong with the old one. The only thing that changes is desire.

This pressure rarely comes from necessity. It comes from comparison; from subtle reminders that what we own is no longer current, that it belongs to a previous launch. We’re trained to notice the difference between models, to feel the distance between “still fine” and “already outdated.” This is also why markets continue to move away from analog design; it becomes harder to justify large price jumps when innovation slows.

Unlike rust, this kind of obsolescence leaves no visible mark. There’s no corrosion, no wear pattern, no sign of honest use. The device doesn’t age; it’s simply replaced. And because there’s no visible decline, there’s no invitation to care, repair, or restrain ourselves.

This cycle reshapes how we relate to objects. We stop asking whether something still serves us and start asking whether it still signals relevance. The decision to replace becomes emotional rather than practical.

Rust resists this logic. It announces itself slowly. It gives a warning. It asks for attention rather than replacement. Where modern objects disappear quietly into drawers and trade-in programs, rust stays visible. It insists on being acknowledged.

And in that insistence, it teaches something we’ve nearly forgotten: that endurance, not newness, is what gives objects—and perhaps people—their meaning.

III. The life and pursuits of rust

Rust is hydrated iron(III) oxide. It forms through an electrochemical process involving iron, oxygen, and water. The result is the familiar flaky, porous, reddish surface we recognize so easily. Unlike protective oxides that form on some metals, rust does not seal. It loosens, spreads, and allows corrosion to continue, often accelerated by salt, acids, and humidity.

At first glance, rust seems purely destructive; a failure of maintenance, a sign that something has been neglected. But that isn’t always true.

With weathering steel, rust is intentional. It forms a stable patina that protects the metal beneath it, slowing further corrosion and removing the need for paint. The surface changes, but the structure holds. This is why rust appears so confidently in architecture, bridges, and industrial design, where it serves both function and beauty.

From this, three realities shape how we understand rust:

• It depends on the material.

• It depends on perspective.

• It depends on whether we accept or ignore it.

On ordinary metal, rust consumes. On engineered steel, it protects. In human terms, the difference often mirrors how we respond to experience, whether pressure erodes us or hardens us into something more resilient.

IV. Perspective changes what corrosion becomes

When something affects us, we choose what it becomes. We can let it weaken us, or we can learn from it and grow stronger. Rust does not make us less. It marks who we have become over time and through exposure.

Acceptance is where things diverge most clearly. We can acknowledge rust and respond to it, or we can pretend it isn’t there. But ignored rust doesn’t disappear. It spreads quietly. It works beneath the surface. It eats away until gaps and fractures form; much like metal left unattended, much like habits or relationships we refuse to examine.

This is where appreciation begins, not in denial, but in recognition.

V. Time made visible

When a car develops rust, it isn’t just an eyesore. It’s evidence of years spent working, commuting, traveling, and moving through the world. It is time made visible. As objects wear, they record life. When we replace things too quickly, we lose the quiet history embedded in them. We also lose a sense of restraint.

Consider the billionaire. If he can afford everything, will he choose to say no to the bigger television or the larger boat? The ability to say no; to stop; to accept enough; is the line between greed and self-discipline. Just because you can does not mean you should. When everything is affordable, restraint stops being a necessity and becomes a choice, and that choice quietly shapes who we become.

Rust stands in quiet opposition to greed. It reminds us that even when something new is within reach, choosing not to replace what still works can be an act of care; and sometimes, an act of wisdom.

Rust, and its human equivalents, wrinkles, folds, and tears, become a mark of having lived rather than a flaw to be erased. That’s why parting with rusted things is so difficult. An old hammer, rusted now, but once your father’s. A paperback falling apart, filled with ten years of notes and underlines. These objects carry memory. They deserve care, not dismissal.

VI. Repair as devotion

My parents once gave me a porcelain coaster from Italy. It became my favorite. One day, it fell and shattered into several pieces. Instead of throwing it away, I glued it back together, filled the gaps with clay, and sealed it.

Now it means more to me than before, precisely because its story is visible. The cracks didn’t ruin it; they added sentimental value.

Meaning often arrives later. Some things are only understood after they’ve endured damage, neglect, or the passage of time. These are the rust moments that add color to life; the ones that teach us how attachment deepens through care.

VII. Choosing things that can rust

In our own lives, we can learn from rust, appreciate it, and even welcome it. That means keeping things longer. Repairing instead of replacing. Choosing what we bring into our lives more carefully in the first place.

We begin to value quality; things built to last; things with the capacity to rust, to change, to carry time with them:

• A KitchenAid mixer instead of cheap plastic.

• An iron skillet instead of disposable nonstick.

• A metal juicer instead of something made to crack.

And this extends beyond objects. It applies to relationships too. We should choose them for depth, for growth, and for what they can become over time, not for how pristine they look at the start.

Rust, after all, is not decay alone. It is proof that something was kept long enough to change. In a culture that replaces at the first sign of friction, rust asks a quieter question: not whether something is worth fixing, but whether we are willing to stay with it long enough for time to leave a mark. What we choose to repair, and what we choose to discard, eventually becomes a record of who we are.

Hello Sardines,

This issue is a little different from our usual essays. As I reflect on 2025, which was both the most difficult and also one of the best years I’ve experienced (more on that later), I found myself looking back at the books I read and reread along the way. What follows are my top picks from the year.

You might use this list to spark a new read or to finally pick up a book you might not have chosen otherwise. In the comments, I’d love for you to share your favorites too, so we can start building a collective shelf for 2026.

Fiction

As I’ve progressed in my reading life, I’ve steadily made more room for fiction. These books tend to outlive the expiration dates of most non-fiction, especially self-help or trend-driven works. Fiction has also quietly shaped modern innovation, from why we call the Metaverse what it is (Snow Crash), to Grok AI (Stranger in a Strange Land), to early explorations of blurred lines between humans and machines (Isaac Asimov’s “Evidence”), to name a few.

Here are some of my favorite fiction reads from this year.

Stoner — John Williams

Stoner follows William Stoner, a quiet Missouri farm boy who becomes a literature professor and lives a life defined more by endurance than achievement. Through failed love, professional disappointment, and private devotion to learning, the novel shows how an apparently ordinary life can carry profound moral weight.

I picked this up after seeing it go viral on X multiple times. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down and finished it in a couple of sittings. I agreed with much of what people said about it, but I also saw myself in it in ways I didn’t expect. It’s the kind of book that stays lodged in your mind long after you close it.

What continues to linger are the layers. I keep thinking about the two kinds of dying Masters talks about, and how different characters throughout the book seem to embody those deaths in their own way. I’m still turning over what it means that Stoner is so often aware of his own voice, how it falters, disappears, or slips out of his control, and how closely that mirrors his life.

Even small details feel intentional, like how Williams introduces so many characters through their glasses, frames, and lenses. I’m not fully sure what to make of that yet, but it feels like a quiet signal about perception and distance.

And then there’s love. Romantic love, yes, but also the quieter kinds, between parent and child, and between a person and their work. That final reflection on Gracie, “you were always there,” hit me harder than I expected. It felt like the novel admitting that presence itself can be a kind of success.

Honestly, it’s a lot to process. That’s what makes it one of the most layered and deeply affecting novels I’ve read in years.

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Children of Time — Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time is a science fiction novel about humanity struggling to survive extinction while confronting intelligence that evolves in an unexpected form.

The story unfolds across two timelines. In one, the last remnants of humanity travel aboard a generation ship searching for a habitable world after Earth’s collapse. Political tension, failing systems, and competing visions for the future threaten the mission from within.

In the other, a failed terraforming experiment accelerates the evolution of spiders on a distant planet. Over thousands of years, they develop language, technology, religion, and social structures that reflect a form of intelligence radically different from human norms, yet internally coherent and adaptive.

I listened to this as an audiobook and highly recommend experiencing it that way. What stayed with me most was how the novel shows humanity trying to control the future, only for nature and reality to produce something entirely different. Very much in the Jurassic Park sense that life finds a way, just not in the way you expect.

Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary follows a lone astronaut tasked with saving humanity, even though he wakes up alone in space with no memory of who he is or why he is there.

As Ryland Grace regains his memories, he learns that Earth is facing extinction due to a mysterious organism draining energy from the sun. Chosen for a last-resort mission with no plan for return, he must rely on science, ingenuity, and persistence to give humanity a chance.

What I enjoyed most was how the book gives genuine humanity to alien life and treats the unknown with curiosity rather than fear. Watching two species struggle to understand one another and slowly break barriers became the emotional core of the story for me.

If you’re a fan of The Martian, you’ll find similar themes here. I’m also looking forward to seeing how the 2026 film adaptation brings that partnership and sense of wonder to the screen.

Electra — Sophocles

Electra is a Greek tragedy centered on grief, justice, and the cost of revenge within a broken royal family.

After the murder of her father Agamemnon by her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, Electra lives in mourning and humiliation at the palace in Mycenae. She refuses to forget the crime, clinging to grief as both resistance and identity.

I wanted to experience this family tragedy from Electra’s perspective, rather than through works like The Oresteia or The Odyssey, which frame the story more broadly. Through Electra’s eyes, every version of justice carries a different moral weight.

By staying close to her voice, Sophocles forces us to confront what it truly means to enact revenge, and to ask whether justice achieved through blood can ever come without unbearable cost.

Doctor Faustus — Christopher Marlowe

Doctor Faustus is a Renaissance tragedy about ambition, knowledge, and the danger of wanting more than the human condition can safely hold.

Faustus, dissatisfied with traditional learning, turns to magic and makes a pact with Mephistopheles, trading his soul for twenty-four years of power.

I reread this after being inspired by it multiple times while writing The Faustian Bargain of AI. Returning to the text reminded me how much there is to relearn from great works when viewed through different lenses. Faustus’s wavering between repentance and pride feels newly relevant in an age that rewards speed, power, and certainty over restraint.

Non-fiction

Non-fiction tends to fall into two categories for me: timely and timeless. Timely works are often stretched beyond their core idea, better suited to essays than full books. Because of that, I read fewer new non-fiction releases and often turn to podcasts for emerging ideas, revisiting books only if they still resonate years later.

Timeless works are different. I gravitate toward recent history, ancient history, philosophy, theology, memoirs, and classics. These stood out most this year.

Peak Mind — Amishi P. Jha

Peak Mind is a science-backed guide to understanding attention, why it fails under stress, and how to rebuild it through short daily practices.

This year, I made a conscious effort to simplify my thought life. My mind felt constantly pulled in too many directions. This became one of the pillar books that helped ground my thinking and restore a healthier relationship with attention.

Its emphasis on presence over productivity, and clarity over hype, makes it especially effective.

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Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World — Mark Kurlansky

This narrative history traces how a single fish shaped global trade, exploration, empire, and modern capitalism.

I enjoyed Cod not only for its subject, but because it connects directly to my family heritage in northern Spain. I’m drawn to micro-histories like this, deep dives into one ingredient or object that reveal how much of the world unfolds from it.

That’s how Mark Kurlansky became one of my favorite authors almost by accident. I picked up several of his books based on theme alone, only later realizing they were by the same writer. The Basque History of the World is another favorite, and next up are Salt and Salmon.

Hitler, My Neighbor — Edgar Feuchtwanger

This memoir recounts the author’s childhood growing up Jewish in Munich while Adolf Hitler lived just down the street.

What makes it powerful is its restraint. Life narrows gradually, restrictions accumulate, and fear becomes ambient rather than dramatic.

Coming from a refugee family, what stayed with me was how easy it is to remain in a threatening situation when daily life still offers familiarity and security. The book is a sober reminder that when something feels deeply wrong, seeking safety while it is still possible can matter more than preserving what feels familiar.

Quantum Supremacy — Michio Kaku

This book explores how quantum computing could transform science, medicine, energy, cryptography, and artificial intelligence.

I didn’t understand everything, but it helped me finally grasp what quantum computing is and how it may shape the world ahead. It feels both like an invitation and a warning, suggesting that understanding new technologies early matters as much as how we choose to use them.

The Wager — David Grann

The Wager reconstructs one of the most harrowing naval disasters of the eighteenth century.

I first read it while writing The Math of Missing, but I directly reflected on it later while working on The Discipline of Not Acting. What stayed with me was how easily the wreck could have been avoided if the captain had listened to wise counsel and paused to reassess.

It’s also a genuinely adventurous read, filled with momentum and well-placed cliffhangers that make it hard to put down.

The Sweaty Startup —

The Sweaty Startup argues that wealth is more often built through unglamorous, service-based businesses than through flashy startups.

I listened to the audiobook while staying in La Herradura near Málaga. It helped me think more creatively about the opportunities around me, especially the ones that are overlooked because they aren’t celebrated in business magazines or on LinkedIn.

The Practice of the Presence of God — Brother Lawrence

This short spiritual work centers on cultivating awareness of God through everyday life.

As part of my effort to renew and simplify my mind, this became a favorite. Lawrence, a monk in the 1600s, held no grand position. He was a shoemaker, yet his way of living left an impact that endures centuries later. A quiet reminder that a meaningful life can be nurtured in any situation.

These were some of the books that shaped my 2025. I already have a growing shelf for 2026, including reading The Brothers Karamazov for the first time and finishing the Three-Body Problem trilogy with Death’s End.

What did you read in 2025, and what are you looking forward to in 2026?

Right out of high school, I was managing a team of employees at the front counter of a fast-food restaurant. It was my job through college, and I enjoyed the many lessons I learned there, including helping with grand openings. In those early days, everything felt like a great storm—especially the day we ran out of buns.

What do you do when you don’t have a main ingredient?

I learned the answer quickly, while imagining myself trying to explain to customers why two-thirds of the menu was suddenly unavailable. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only manager on shift that day.

Someone a couple of decades older than me happened to be there for part of it. He helped me work through the situation by calling other stores in our franchise to ask for extra buns. When those stores said they didn’t have any—and when I normally would have hit a dead end—he suggested going to a warehouse store like Costco or Sam’s Club to buy emergency buns.

The buns were slightly different, and corporate wouldn’t have liked the idea, but it solved the problem. We could only react to the immediate emergency, not the deeper inventory issue, which we had no control over. We let customers know ahead of time that the buns were different, and they were fine with it.

What stayed with me wasn’t the workaround itself, but how it emerged. While I was busy bracing for impact, someone else had paused long enough to orient himself within the problem.

Through that experience, and many others, I began to notice how often the urge to look busy replaces the harder work of stepping back; of observing the problem, identifying the bottleneck, and resisting the comfort of motion. Stepping back, and resisting gut reactions, often allows clearer thinking and better decisions.

History offers harsher examples of what happens when that pause never comes.

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Betting on the wrong ideas

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann recounts the 1740 wreck of the British warship HMS Wager off the coast of Patagonia and the chaos that followed. Stranded sailors fractured into rival groups, each struggling to survive under brutal conditions. When some survivors eventually returned to England, they offered sharply conflicting accounts of what had happened.

One group framed their actions as discipline and heroism; the other described mutiny, cruelty, and murder. The resulting court-martial forced the Navy to decide not only who had broken the rules, but whose version of the truth would be believed.

At its core, the book examines how people behave under extreme pressure, how authority erodes, and how truth itself becomes unstable when survival is at stake.

David Cheap did not spend decades growing into the role of captain of the HMS Wager. He was promoted shortly before the voyage, elevated by commission rather than long experience in independent command. When the Wager wrecked and order collapsed, Cheap clung to naval hierarchy as the last structure he knew. His authority was real, but new and untested, and under brutal survival conditions, it proved brittle. What had made him captain on paper became, in extremis, a source of isolation, conflict, and ultimately mutiny.

Cheap had potential; it’s why he was promoted. But he focused more on making a name for himself than on accepting short-term retreats for long-term success. When the ship faced treacherous waters and worsening weather, Cheap sailed onward against the wishes of his advisors, hoping momentum itself would carry them through. Instead, he shipwrecked his crew, and their journey ended in sickness, death, turmoil, and scandal.

Had the captain listened to his advisors and sought refuge elsewhere to wait out the conditions, he might have become a successful captain through that decision alone, marking his name in naval history as a hero. This tension—between stubborn resolve and prudent restraint—appeared repeatedly among both his enemies and his supporters during the stranded journey.

This arrogance cost Cheap much of his legacy. But it also leaves us with a lesson that is less comfortable than it appears: progress does not always come from pushing forward. Sometimes it comes from stopping, assessing, and absorbing wisdom—even when time feels scarce.

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Taking a step back

The best advice I received in my early days of management was simple: stop.

When everything seemed chaotic, with long lines at the register, my instinct was to jump on a register to help. It felt useful and visible. But that wasn’t the bottleneck. The real issue was often a delay in the kitchen for a specific food item, which then rippled outward into longer lines up front and in the drive-thru.

An experienced manager once told me not to act right away, but to step back and watch what was happening for a few minutes. By taking that time—even when it felt like precious time lost—I could solve the problem more accurately and more quickly than if I had acted blindly.

This tension is a contest between reaction and judgment. We can react immediately, as a busy or anxious person might, or we can slow down and absorb enough information to decide well. Often, it’s only by stepping back that we uncover not just the real problem, but the real purpose.

The Gospel of Luke offers a familiar illustration. Jesus is surrounded by his followers in Martha’s home. Mary, her sister, listens intently to his teachings. Martha, meanwhile, is stressed about preparing the food. Her concerns are valid—but she misses the moment’s purpose. There would always be time later for meals and order.

In this instance, teaching, wisdom, and presence mattered more. That’s why, when Martha says, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me,” Jesus replies, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Mary’s stillness is not a rejection of action, but a reminder that attention matters—and that motion without awareness often mistakes urgency for purpose.

Shaping a mental mode for stepping back

Over time, I began to notice a pattern in the moments when restraint actually helped. It wasn’t a formula, and it wasn’t something I followed consistently, but the same posture seemed to repeat itself whenever judgment improved.

I first encountered a version of this idea through Brendan Burchard’s High Performance Habits, where he describes how high performers intentionally choose the emotional states they bring into demanding situations. But I’ve also seen it expressed in simpler, quieter ways.

There’s a story that circulated online about a hardworking father in the trades who would sit in his car for a few minutes before entering his home, sometimes touching the tree in his front yard, leaving his work frustrations outside so he could show up fully for his family. The ritual wasn’t about productivity or discipline. It was about transition and refusing to carry one context unexamined into another.

When restraint worked, it usually began with a period of watching and listening. In moments of pressure, the instinct is to react quickly, driven by anxiety or fear. But when I resisted that pull and focused instead on absorbing what was actually happening—who was involved, where tension was accumulating, what signals were being missed—the situation often revealed more than it did under immediate action.

After that pause, certain details tended to stand out. Some problems announced themselves loudly, while others quietly shaped everything downstream. Over time, I learned that identifying the real source of friction mattered more than addressing surface symptoms.

A business professor once described this as “finding the artery first.” When an artery is damaged, the entire system suffers. You can treat symptoms, but unless the core issue is addressed, the damage continues. In business, that artery is often cash flow. Without it, fixing smaller issues becomes a fruitless exercise.

Context, I found, was what ultimately determined whether restraint helped or hurt. A family member of mine owns a commercial holiday lighting business and once secured a major contract with a city planning for a Christmas event. When a key supplier delivered late, the city leaders were disappointed but understanding. My relative could have blamed the supplier and installed only what was available. Instead, he recognized the broader context. The event mattered deeply to the city, and visible gaps would affect the relationship regardless of fault. He used his own inventory to complete the display as planned, then added the delayed items when they arrived.

The result was more than a satisfied client. He demonstrated reliability under pressure (this solidifies long-term relationships). Awareness, not urgency, guided the decision.

A quieter version of this tension appears in John Williams’s Stoner. The profession, William Stoner, is right to challenge a student he believes should not advance. Still, he presses the issue so directly that it becomes a defining battle, costing him allies and shaping the rest of his career. With greater awareness, he might have chosen to lose that fight and preserve his energy for the work and life he ultimately cared about. In some ways, he may have forgotten the advice he once received from his mentor:

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing.”

For me, even when clarity emerged, there was still the temptation to drift toward the what ifs—to imagine cascading failures, hypothetical outcomes, and consequences that hadn’t yet arrived. That habit often created paralysis rather than progress. What restored movement was a quieter shift toward the what cans: what could actually be done now, in this moment, with the information at hand.

Not long ago, when I experienced several challenges at once, they felt impossible to solve together. My father reminded me to focus on one thing at a time. That reminder didn’t resolve everything, but it pulled me out of speculation and back into action. By staying with the what cans, the rest gradually followed.

Developing routine checks

This habit is fragile. Under pressure, it’s easy to revert to old patterns. The instinct to act, to prove usefulness, to signal control, is powerful. With time and repetition, the pause becomes easier to access, but the early stages are critical.

What helps me maintain perspective is building visible, tangible habits. When I feel overwhelmed by outcomes, I return to my task list. Fixating on the end result without addressing the steps gets me nowhere. Progress, even incremental, restores confidence.

I also try to ask about purpose. Before important decisions, I ask why I’m here and what I actually want long term. What will matter five years from now? These questions pull me out of survival mode and back into perspective.

Ultimately, mental health is the foundation for stepping back and assessing clearly. That foundation requires care: limiting dopamine-driven distractions, setting no-digital time blocks, practicing meditation or prayer, staying socially connected, exercising, and spending time outdoors.

I still don’t always pause before reacting. But I’ve learned that when judgment fails, it’s rarely because I lacked options. More often, it’s because I moved before I understood where I was.

There’s a moment (usually a small one, almost throwaway) when I catch myself acting like two different people. Maybe it happens while I’m writing a post, or while I'm hesitating before I speak, or while I'm adjusting some part of myself I didn’t mean to adjust. There’s the version of me who lives, and the version shaped by whoever might be watching.

Robert Louis Stevenson understood that fracture long before we had screens or feeds. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he wrote about what happens when a person is asked to shrink themselves to make another more acceptable.

The story is more than Gothic fiction; it is about a mirror.

The story in three strokes

Dr. Jekyll is a respected Victorian scientist who creates a potion to separate the parts of himself he feels he cannot show the world, and from that experiment emerges Mr. Hyde—violent, unrestrained, and freed from social expectation.

At first, Jekyll believes he can control the division, slipping between identities as if changing coats, letting Hyde carry the weight of desires he refuses to admit.

But the boundary thins, Hyde grows stronger, and Jekyll ultimately discovers that a self, exiled into darkness, does not disappear—it takes over.

Living inside a script

Victorian London taught people to live in straight lines. A life could stretch only as far as its place in the social order allowed, and the boundaries were enforced with quiet, suffocating precision. Certain behaviors weren’t simply discouraged, but they were hidden, pushed under floorboards, buried beneath polite conversation. Stepping outside the approved shape of who you were expected to be meant risking your place in the world.

Today, the pressure looks different but feels familiar. Our “place” is not defined by birth or title but by the soft architecture of digital life: profiles, algorithms, the unspoken rules of visibility. We curate ourselves, trim our edges, and try to become acceptable to both people and machines.

Julian Shapiro recently described how some relationships last only as long as a person remains useful—a subtle, transactional instinct that feels less like a bond and more like an optimization. Even our connections become part of the performance.

Stevenson recognized this machinery long before we had language for it. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not only a gothic tale; it’s a portrait of any world that prizes appearance over humanity. Through one divided body, he reveals that every person carries two selves: one shaped by expectation, the other by desire.

That tension becomes the story's pulse.

Victorian society carved people into narrow roles: refined, obedient, and controlled. These roles promised stability, but only if the person inside them stayed small. You spoke and behaved a certain way, and even restricted your inner world. Respectability became a costume fastened tightly each morning. Any drift from the script invited judgment or ruin.

A similar pressure hums today. We shape our identities in public spaces where visibility can feel like vulnerability, and self-expression tangles with performance. A “profile” becomes a calling card: a curated version of the self, polished before anyone ever sees it. We learn quickly what is rewarded and what disappears into the feed.

Stevenson collapses these pressures into a single figure. Jekyll isn’t only a doctor with a secret; he represents anyone who has been told, explicitly or silently, to be only one version of themselves. Hyde, the “indecent” self, isn’t an invention but the part of Jekyll that never received permission to live. And the brilliance of the story is not that Jekyll transforms, but that he was already both people.

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Small cracks in the social armor

Even characters who never touch the potion reveal the strain of self-containment. Mr. Utterson, steady as stone, carries his hidden warmth like a candle in a locked box. Only in private moments—“when the wine was to his taste”—does “something eminently human beacon” from his eye. A small light leaks through a heavy curtain. We know that feeling today: the relief of speaking freely in a private chat, the ease of being ourselves when no metrics follow us, the softness that returns when we are unobserved.

Poole, the butler, stands at the other end of the spectrum: composed, dutiful, controlled. He looks exactly as society wants him to look, performing his role seamlessly even as the house around him begins to tremble.

Jekyll stands between these figures, pulled by both loyalty and desire. One part of him wants to obey. The other rebels.

Hyde as the door that opens

Hyde isn’t simply rebellion, though; he is release. The exhale after years of holding the breath. A life without the weight of eyes. But in Stevenson’s story, that release quickly mutates. Hyde tramples a child, murders an innocent man, and lashes out with unprovoked violence. He is what happens when a hidden self is not acknowledged and integrated, but forced to grow (and deform) alone in the dark.

Our modern life mirrors this divide. There is the self shaped by algorithms—tidy, consistent, predictable—and the inner self that wants to speak in its own strange cadence, unmeasured and alive. Hyde becomes the shadow-self who slips past the machinery of judgment, tasting oxygen that Jekyll has long denied.

For Jekyll, this feels like salvation. For a moment, he imagines a clean division:

– A public self that can keep its place
– A private self that can slip into the dark unnoticed

“If each… could but be housed in separate identities,” he thinks, “life would be relieved of all that was unbearable.” It is a tempting dream: a life without conflict, a heart without contradiction. But the self is not a building; its walls are thin.

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When the hidden self grows teeth

At first, Hyde protects Jekyll. He absorbs the consequences of desire, leaving Jekyll’s outward life untouched. But the moment Hyde steps into daylight, society reacts with force: “the hands of all people” rise against him. The same culture that demanded Jekyll’s silence now threatens his escape. And something irreversible begins.

The part of Jekyll that once asked to breathe now demands space. What he tried to release in small, controlled doses grows stronger each time it returns. The hidden self does not disappear into the shadows but expands to fill them.

This is the danger of exile: what we bury sharpens itself in the dark. Soon, Jekyll can no longer choose his form. Hyde arrives unbidden. The door swings open by itself, and the split he believed he could manage now manages him.

The cost of a single allowed self

Stevenson leaves the reader with a quiet, devastating truth: people cannot survive by amputating the parts of themselves that don’t fit the world’s script. Victorian society demanded singularity, but the human spirit resists such narrow architecture. Our digital age echoes this in softer ways, rewarding polished identities while letting our other rooms go dim.

Jekyll’s tragedy isn’t Hyde, but the belief that Hyde must be erased. A society that fears complexity will always fracture its people. And a person who forces themselves into one agreeable, digestible shape will eventually feel the strain.

Stevenson’s story becomes a lantern placed gently in our hands: a reminder that we are never one thing. The world may reward simplicity, but the self is not simple. It is a home with many rooms—light, shadow, contradiction, and longing. Wholeness comes not from choosing a room but from letting them all breathe.

Removing the filter

For us, the invitation is gentler but not easier: to stop hiding the rooms we’ve learned to keep locked. To let ourselves exist without trimming away the parts that feel inconvenient to the crowd. Living honestly will cost us something—like misunderstanding, indifference, the occasional rejection—but there is a deeper ache in being loved for a version of ourselves we don’t recognize.

And once we stop performing for the invisible gaze, something shifts. The algorithm loses its authority. Growth (online or otherwise) stops being a negotiation with machinery and becomes a slow accumulation of people who meet us where we actually live. It may be quieter, but it is real. And real things last.

The world will always try to make us smaller, simpler, and easier to categorize. But a life built on performance collapses under its own architecture. A life built on truth—even small, steady truth—gives us room to breathe.

Slow growth, slow companionship, slow influence: these are not losses. They are the long, patient shape of a self allowed to exist without disguise.

And if Jekyll teaches us anything, it’s this: the parts of us we hide don’t disappear—they wait, and often, grow uncontrollably.

Recently, I noticed an article arguing that soybean oil might be a major contributor to the Western obesity crisis. In an X post about it, several replies said something like, “Finally. This concern is being taken seriously.”

It reminded me of early COVID-19 debates, when certain ideas were brushed aside or minimized, only to later be proven partially or entirely true.

Moments like these reveal something fragile about public discourse today.

We hesitate to engage ideas we can’t yet prove. We fear the wildfire of conspiracy theories, and rightly so. But we forget that every true thing begins as something unproven: a theory, a “what if,” or a quiet suspicion that deserves examination.

When we shut down the “what ifs,” we stunt public intelligence and shrink our collective room to explore new truths.

II. Ignorance as a doorway, not a defect

In The Gift of Ignorance, I argued that ignorance isn’t inherently bad. It is a starting point, a doorway. The danger comes when ignorance hardens into arrogance and when the amateur becomes so certain that curiosity dies. But humility in the amateur is powerful:

• New eyes bring new perspectives.

• Naive curiosity can notice patterns the expert overlooks.

• Coincidences sometimes deserve a closer look simply because someone was willing to ask the question others ignore.

When established schools of thought reject novelty, it often comes from fear: fear of disruption, fear of loss, or fear of rewriting what they have already built. Innovation threatens comfort. But fear also exists on the other side. Misinformation can harm institutions, reputations, and entire fields of study.

Both fears are real. Both must be acknowledged.

This tension becomes clearer when we look at how theories form—and how they fracture.

III. Where theories go wrong and where they begin

Some theories, like flat earth claims or moon landing denial, cause cultural and educational decline. They spread quickly because they are dramatic, offer a simplified escape from reality, or feed existing distrust of institutions. The theories function as interesting thought exercises but rarely evolve. They begin and end in the same place: unfalsifiable, self-referential loops.

Beneath the cultural baggage, though, a conspiracy theory is still a hypothesis—a claim without evidence, pointing toward an alternative explanation of events. The “conspiracy” label simply adds context: it is a theory that contradicts what most people believe to be true. All unknown truths start here, with a hypothesis, with gut and observation, and with someone willing to test the idea. That is the dividing line:

• The true seeker moves from intuition to evidence.

• The conspiracist stops at intuition alone.

But bad theories are not the only threat to truth; rigidity within expertise can be just as limiting.

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IV. When expertise becomes a barrier to truth

Experts give us the best version of truth we have at the moment. As new evidence arrives, they should update their conclusions. Nutrition science is a good example; its guidance evolves because the evidence evolves. But expertise also carries incentives: status, security, and financial interest. These forces can tempt experts to defend the status quo instead of the truth.

So when an amateur proposes an idea, it is often dismissed before the scientific method can even begin. No testing, no inquiry, no honest evaluation. Only rejection. This disdain extends to self-education. Someone who teaches themselves—reads voraciously, studies independently, and experiments consistently—can still be labeled “undereducated.”

Bruce Weber’s New York Times obituary of Tom Stoppard (the award-winning playwright) illustrates this tension. He writes:

“A voracious reader but otherwise remarkably undereducated for a writer of such voluminous knowledge and understanding…”

The line drew criticism for elitism. Weber contradicts the entire statement with “such voluminous knowledge and understanding.” Even if he didn’t intend the assumption, the remark exposes an underlying belief: education only counts when it comes from an institution.

But Stoppard—self-taught, relentless, and curious—was far more educated than the average graduate. I would argue he was not undereducated but overeducated, in the truest sense.

I once posted on Threads that a self-motivated learner can surpass a college graduate through reading, networking, and a passion for knowledge. The post went mildly viral, and some academics attacked the idea as if I had dismissed formal education entirely.

I hadn’t. I value institutional education. I’m grateful for my degrees. But curiosity does not need permission to search for truth, and it can lead to outcomes as rigorous—and sometimes more rigorous—than formal learning.

We also have countless examples of outsiders improving fields, not out of ignorance but through cross-disciplinary brilliance. Biomimicry borrows engineering solutions from nature. Philosophers advise AI companies on ethics. One neonatal team even invited Ferrari’s Formula 1 pit crew to study their chaotic handover process. Watching how pit crews transfer responsibility in seconds with flawless coordination, the doctors adopted similar role assignments and communication habits. The redesigned protocols helped save newborn lives around the world. The insight wasn’t technical; it was perceptual. The outsiders simply saw what insiders had stopped seeing.

Inviting the “non-expert” does not mean inviting someone who knows nothing. It means inviting someone who knows something different, something the field lacks.

V. Rediscovering curiosity in an expert-obsessed world

When we allow honest dialogue with unfamiliar people and unfamiliar ideas, no matter how odd, naive, or unpolished, we expand our capacity to see what we have been missing.

Everyone is an expert in something: a profession, a hobby, a life experience, a hardship, a culture, or a way of observing the world.

If we honor these forms of expertise, both formal and informal, we give institutions room to grow, ideas room to breathe, and truths room to emerge. The pursuit of truth has never belonged exclusively to the credentialed. It belongs to anyone willing to investigate with humility, curiosity, and integrity.

That is how knowledge moves forward—not by silencing the amateur, but by listening for the insight tucked inside their quiet, “I’m not an expert, but…”

Coffee has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a child, I dipped my toast into my café con leche, though mine probably had a teaspoon of actual coffee, and I remember watching my dad drink it every morning and again in the afternoon. It was a quiet ritual that shaped our days. Over time, I began drinking stronger coffee myself. First, every other day. Then daily. Then multiple times daily, until it became part of my rhythm.

The drinks I enjoyed changed as I grew. I started with café con leche, then drip coffee with milk and sugar, until I relied on cafecitos and coladas. Eventually, the cafecito turned into an espresso with no sugar. Today, I stick to an Americano in the morning, an espresso in the afternoon, and on some days, I treat myself to a cortado.

One habit from my coffee routine grew naturally. After long hours working at a coffee shop or in an office, I noticed that drinking larger cups like drip coffee, an Americano, or a café con leche became a kind of dance. I would start hot and sip slowly. Then the cup turned warm, then room temperature, and finally cold. Over time, I grew to appreciate these stages. Thinking now, it reminds me of a journey, descending through layers almost like Dante’s Divine Comedy.

II. Coffee as a clock

This experience can be summed up as slow drinking, the idea that a cup can be enjoyed at every stage, temperature, and texture. These stages create different emotional experiences.

• Hot: a brief urgency to enjoy the coffee at its most familiar

• Warm: presence and appreciation

• Room temperature: stillness and acceptance

• Cold: a small reinvention

Coffee becomes a multi-dimensional experience that explores the varying qualities of a single cup.

Most people try to freeze their drink in one state, rushing for a warmer or abandoning it once it cools. But the shift from hot to warm, and from warm to room temperature, is fleeting and easy to miss, even though those transitions hold something meaningful.

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III. Learning to notice the transitions

Drinking coffee in these stages reminds me of life’s rhythms. Most transitions go unnoticed until they are fully behind us. A child stops asking for help with their shoes. Your morning run slows without your permission. A hobby you once picked up for fun becomes the thing people come to you for. These subtle, almost invisible moments reveal small truths about our journey. Each threshold holds meaning if we slow down and appreciate it.

Each stage of our lives has something to offer at its own pace. Heat, or moments of accomplishment and celebration, fades fast but transforms us. We look back on those times as mile markers. When life cools or slows, we begin to understand everything we experienced to reach this stage.

The cooling cup reflects a different part of who we are.

Hot, warm, and cold form a quiet continuity between who you were, who you are now, and who you are becoming. Growing up drinking café con leche, I can take that same cup hot and remember childhood. As it grows warm and then cold, I reflect on how this drink followed me from child to father. A small ritual somehow holds an entire life inside it.

When you see these stages together, and the value of different experiences within the same substance, the lesson becomes simple: savor what you have. The mundane moments are often the truest ones. How we interpret them reveals what matters to us and who we are becoming. In their own way, these transitions carry us gently down through the layers of our days, if we’re willing to notice them.

It was a beautiful day in April this year. My wife, kids, and I had breakfast in Almería and ordered tostadas with cheese, avocado, and tomato. The kids had olive oil on theirs. My wife and I enjoyed a café con leche and a cortado, and the kids had orange juice. Then we ended our morning at Mercadona to grab a few groceries for a picnic the next day at the beach next to Iglesia Cabo de Gata.

As the grocer was ringing up our food, I knew something was off. The conveyor belt froze. The lights stayed on, but the grocer said something wasn’t working with the power.

When we stepped outside, we walked straight into the historic outage across Europe, known as the 2025 Iberian Peninsula Blackout. A voltage surge had knocked out electricity across Spain and Portugal. We didn’t know it then because we had no connection to the outside world. No cellphone service. No Wi-Fi. Just our eyes and ears.

As we headed toward our apartment, employees stood in the doorframes of their shops. Waiters leaned against walls, watching the street. The traffic moved cautiously, inventing its own rules without functioning streetlights.

The only thing left to do was buy ice cream for the kids with cash. I hoped for a discount, since everything was melting. But we paid full price for ice cream that was already sinking into the night.

Back home, we opened the balcony doors to watch the slow-moving crowds and enjoy the view of Santuario de la Virgen del Mar.

The outage lasted hours for some, and far longer for others. We waited twenty-one hours, much longer than most in the country. What stayed with me was not the outage but how people reacted.

I didn’t react with the same steady calm I saw around me. Something in me panicked. It wasn’t dramatic panic, but it was real. I turned off all our battery-powered devices, checked our water, and scanned the apartment for anything we might need if things got worse.

Outside, a small line had formed for water. People took a single jug, maybe two, and walked off unbothered. Their quiet, measured response startled me. It made my own instinct to brace for disaster feel automatic, almost learned. By the morning, I relaxed into the outage the way everyone else already had. I even enjoyed the slowness of it. But I regretted the time I lost at the start, the hours I spent preparing for a crisis that never came.

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I grew up in South Florida, so outages were part of life.

During Frances and Wilma, two back-to-back hurricanes, we were without electricity for a couple of weeks. We used small generators and car batteries. Friends and family gathered in one place to play board games and pass the time together. But we always had days to prepare.

Before a storm, we stocked propane, bought drinking water, filled tubs, cleared yards, charged batteries, and checked every possible box. Preparation gave us comfort.

But what happens when you cannot prepare? These moments show something raw and unfiltered about us, revealing how people respond when disruption arrives without warning.

Unexpected disconnection does not create chaos. It reveals the culture we already live in.

When connection goes dark

During hurricanes, there are usually three kinds of people.

• The careless: the overconfident residents who prepare little and assume they can take on any storm until it is too late.

• The preparer: the steady planners who gather what they need to be comfortable for two weeks.

• The anxious: the ones who overprepare, argue, and spiral into panic.

All three show up every year.

Mixed together, they create predictable chaos. But culture and environment shape this response. Chaos during disconnection is not universal. In Spain, I saw something very different.

There was no storm or imminent danger. But the uncertainty alone would create concern back home. In Florida, even a short outage fills Facebook groups within minutes. A little longer, and you see gas lines forming.

In Almería, people kept eating and walking. Hours later, deep into the night, families sat in plazas and bars. In the morning, there was still no power, yet life continued. Schools closed, some businesses shut down, but the pace of daily life remained calm. Across the country, social media praised how well Spain handled the blackout. The contrast was stark: one culture rushes to solve problems that have not fully formed. The other pauses, breathes, and accepts the moment as it comes.

Much of this starts long before any disruption.

The day before the outage, I watched the courtyard of a café. Out of all the tables, only one couple, tourists, had their phones out. Everyone else was fully present with their conversations, tostadas, and drinks.

Maybe that is the difference. One culture practices distraction without noticing. The other practices presence without trying. When the lights go out, those patterns show themselves.

When connection creates disconnection

The internet offers incredible things. We can communicate with people far away, discover communities, and learn anything. But somewhere along the way, digital connection shifted from an alternative to our primary way of relating to each other.

Don DeLillo’s novella The Silence follows five people on Super Bowl Sunday when every digital device suddenly shuts down. He never explains the cause. Instead, he examines how quickly language, habits, and identity begin to unravel when technology goes quiet.

He writes one chilling sentence:

“What happens to people who live inside their phones?”

When I compare the reactions of two cultures, in two different circumstances, much of the difference comes down to where we actually live our lives.

Technology can separate us from what is real. But underneath every tweet, ping, and message is a desire for connection. Once we understand that desire, we can shift the balance toward physical experiences again.

Relearning presence

Recently, I have put more weight on physical experiences. I have been playing more board games, like Catan, with friends and family. We forget our phones exist and spend two hours trading, conquering, and laughing.

I have taken the kids to more outdoor events and parks. We met family at a resort in Orlando, visited new parks, and walked more.

I have also made an effort to spark small conversations in coffee shops, supermarkets, and other public spaces.

After a few days of this, my anxiety levels dropped and I enjoyed my days more.

These experiences reminded me that digital connections are good substitutes, but they are not the main thing. With an 80/20 balance, we can keep most of our life rooted in the physical world and let the digital fill in the gaps. Like grounding in a psychological sense, this becomes a simple foundation for choosing the things that bring more happiness and meaning into our days.

Maybe real connection only reveals itself when the digital world finally goes quiet.